Photographing the full moon

Tomorrow we get a full moon opportunity that is called a “Blood Moon”. It will typically be burnt orange in color. This phenomenon is created when the earth passes between the sun and the moon. The earth’s shadow covers the moon, and this changes the surface from a bright white, to a burnt orange to sometimes red color.

Those in North America get one of these opportunities early Wednesday morning. So here are a few tips to help you out.

1. Long Lens – A long zoom lens works best. A long zoom lens on a cropped sensor camera works even better as you get more effective magnification.  A lot of bridge cameras feature zoom lenses that are advertised as 600mm equivalents, or even higher. These give you the greatest reach in order to fill the frame with the moon. After all, few of us can afford 800mm lenses. So don’t be ashamed to scale back to a bridge camera for the extra reach.

But if you are full frame DSLR shooter, and cannot afford a 400mm zoom along with a 2X teleconverter in order to get 800mm to fill the frame, then you might actually want to scale back to a bridge camera (The nicer end of the point and shoot range) in order to do so. A 200mm F/2.8 is an awesome lens, but it simply does not have the reach needed on a full frame sensor camera to capture a full moon shot when high in the sky.

However, if you have a very high MP camera like a Nikon D7 00 or so, then you get so much extra cropping ability thanks to all of those megapixels that you should be able to crop it down to suit.

2. Perspective – The best way to compensate for a lack of a super zoom lens, is to catch the moon as it is rising or setting. Choose to capture both the moon and a far away object next to it. By being far away from that object on the horizon and zooming back in, you are effectively shrinking that object down and making the moon appear to be much larger. Some believe that it is atmospheric effects that make the moon appear to be larger on the horizon. The truth is it is an optical illusion thanks to perspective.