Moonlit cityscape

rutt · August 26, 2005

Last night the quarter moon was rising over the harbor and I thought I'd get out my tripod and go up on the roof with my 24mm f1.4 and see if I could capture the beautiful scene.

Well, I couldn't. Not even close. When the harbor and street were in correctly exposed, the moon was way overexposed.

OK, I thought, I'll shoot two and combine in PS. I bracketed like crazy, but that wide angle lens just couldn't seem to resolve enough moon to capture the scene in any reasonable way.

I'm thinking I might need to compose a separate moon shot with the cityscape and use a longer lens to shoot the moon.

Didn't Ansel Adams do this? But without artificial light.

Any clues?

pathfinder · August 26, 2005

John, you have just learned first hand about the brightness of the sunlit moon, versus night on the earth's surface.

( I know you don't like emoticons , but I want to make sure that this is read as a friendly light tone, John)

I think a great number of prints incorporating the moon are composited - sometime with longer lenses for the moon itself. Just my opinion, but in many prints the moon IS VASTLY larger than it is in real life. Again it points out the difference between the way the human eye sees a scene, and the way a camera's lens sees the scene. The human eye can focus on remote details like the moon and it seems bigger than it is when viewed through 24mm.

I don't know what Ansel Adams did for his moon shots - but I doubt film can encompass the entire exposure variation between detail in the moon's surface and the desert floor. What do you think after your experience?

rutt · August 26, 2005

Thanks, Jim. I didn't need a smiley to know that you were being friendly. It's hard to imagine anything else.

I think I did understand the problem even before I went to shoot. I've suffered though enough attempts to photograph the moon (and sunsets for that matter) to know what to expect.

The mystery is what to do about it. Adams is proof that it can be done without digital tools. What do we think he did? I'm not really up on his darkroom technique, though I think it was prodigious. With that tripod and field camera, he could easily have taken two shots is two exposures, enlarged the moon shot, and composted. He had way more resolution to play with than any DSLR. But somehow, that doesn't seem right. Again, I don't know enough about his technique.

pathfinder · August 26, 2005

I nothing at all Adams technical darkroom work, although everyone says it was superb.

Enlarging a moon slightly with an 8x10 negative and an enlarger would not be difficult though. It may be the secret is lost to the ages. Moonrise over Hernandez can be seen here http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/adams/adams_moonrise_full.html

rutt · August 26, 2005

pathfinder wrote:

I nothing at all Adams technical darkroom work, although everyone says it was superb.

Enlarging a moon slightly with an 8x10 negative and an enlarger would not be difficult though. It may be the secret is lost to the ages. Moonrise over Hernandez can be seen here http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/adams/adams_moonrise_full.html

*Sigh* and double *sigh*. And this is just some crummy online scan. Just think how good it looks in a book. Just think how good one of those original huge prints look.

Doesn't look to me like he resorted to anything as obvious as enlarging the moon and composting. And the rest of the shot is so beautifully exposed. I think the moon might be just a hair overexposed.

Shooting when the moon is lower on the horizon than I did may be the heart of the trick. There would be several advantages. Just as with the sun when it is low on the horizon, it's not as bright because it has to filter through more atmosphere and it would look larger when it was lower. Shooting in the desert instead an Atlantic island definitly has some advantage for clarity.

I was going to guess that there was still some sunlight, but this is a 2/3 moon (asuming it really is moonrise, not moonset) so the sun would have been well down.

rutt · August 26, 2005

Is there a filter trick Adams might have used? I know almost nothing about filters.

XO-Studios · August 26, 2005

rutt wrote:

Is there a filter trick Adams might have used? I know almost nothing about filters.

That picture was actually in Portland at the Nature museum 2 years ago.

here is some of what I recall:

1) it was shot early evening before total darkness so the difference between the exposure of the moon and the rest of the picture was not that enormous. As you can see the fronts of the crosses on the cemetary are still catching the setting sun.

2) Ansel used to mask the photopaper by moving his hand between the enlarger and the paper, and as such dodge/burn the old fashioned way.

FWIW,

XO,

gtc · September 6, 2005

big moon illusions
the moon is actually the same size when its on the horizon as it is overhead-its an optical illusion which can be demonstrated by measuring that big cheesy moon between ones fingers-it instantly shrinks back to its actual tiny size-remove the pinch of your fingers from around it and it springs back to its illusory size-so any photo with a large moon behind a foreground image has to be a montage-and even Ansel Adams would have had to use some darkroom magic to increase the actual size of the moon to reflect the illusory size that we see-so its not actually cheating rather its correcting the image so that it represents what we think we see....

rutt wrote:

*Sigh* and double *sigh*. And this is just some crummy online scan. Just think how good it looks in a book. Just think how good one of those original huge prints look.

Doesn't look to me like he resorted to anything as obvious as enlarging the moon and composting. And the rest of the shot is so beautifully exposed. I think the moon might be just a hair overexposed.

Shooting when the moon is lower on the horizon than I did may be the heart of the trick. There would be several advantages. Just as with the sun when it is low on the horizon, it's not as bright because it has to filter through more atmosphere and it would look larger when it was lower. Shooting in the desert instead an Atlantic island definitly has some advantage for clarity.

I was going to guess that there was still some sunlight, but this is a 2/3 moon (asuming it really is moonrise, not moonset) so the sun would have been well down.

erich6 · September 6, 2005

GTC is right on in his description of the moon size. The illusion of a larger moon is caused by the brain actually.... The brain tends to enlarge the moon to compensate for its distance. When it's farther away it thinks it's actually closer. But a closer object would have to be bigger so it the moon looks larger. It's very odd but true.

I don't see any problems with doing a bit of digital compositing to get the scene to look as it appeared to you. That's more important to many photographs than just faithfully representing the physical size of objects in a scene. I believe the pro's of old used to do the same with darkroom montages.

Here's a shot I took of Seattle at night. The moon was actually over the city that night but I couldn't get it to look right with the straight wide angle composition. I changed my lens and took a shot of the moon with a telephoto and then combined in Photoshop. I resized the moon to what I remembered it look like that night. My point of reference was the top of the Space Needle.... The moon looked almost as big as the top of the Needle.

Erich

TristanP · September 9, 2005

Shooting the moon almost always requires multiple shots. I saw this moonrise and had to gether my gear quickly before it rose too high. This pano was a composite. The moon was *very* slightly enlarged - just enough so that the moon detail layer was barely larger than the moon glare from the background city shot. I forget the focal length, but it was down at the low end of the F717.

erich6 · September 9, 2005

TristanP wrote:

Shooting the moon almost always requires multiple shots. I saw this moonrise and had to gether my gear quickly before it rose too high. This pano was a composite. The moon was *very* slightly enlarged - just enough so that the moon detail layer was barely larger than the moon glare from the background city shot. I forget the focal length, but it was down at the low end of the F717.

That's a nice shot Tristan. Great composite.

Erich

Andy · September 11, 2005

shaytech moon exposure calculator
shaytech moon exposure calculator

erich6 · September 12, 2005

andy wrote:

shaytech moon exposure calculator

Way cool!

Higgmeister · September 13, 2005

XO-Studios wrote:

That picture was actually in Portland at the Nature museum 2 years ago.

here is some of what I recall:

1) it was shot early evening before total darkness so the difference between the exposure of the moon and the rest of the picture was not that enormous. As you can see the fronts of the crosses on the cemetary are still catching the setting sun.

2) Ansel used to mask the photopaper by moving his hand between the enlarger and the paper, and as such dodge/burn the old fashioned way.

FWIW,

XO,

I too saw that print in a 4' x 5' display in San Diego back a few years ago (23 years

). It took my breath away. From a story I saw on PBS about this shot, it was a spur of the moment sight and he only got off one shot before the lighting went away.

Rutt, I think your idea of using a filter is superb. A split NG filter would definitely help. Another thing you could do is use a piece of dark board and dodge during the exposure like you would during printing. If you have a dark sky and the moon is by itself, then a constant movement of the board would give a smooth transition. Maybe worth a try.

Good Luck,
Chris

Note: If you have a small circle taped or glued to a long wire (coat hanger painted black) you may be able to dodge just the moon and area around it while taking the longer exposure for the city.

Moonlit cityscape

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