Have you ever tried taking pictures of the moon? If you have, now's your chance to show us your incredible skills! If you haven't, now's the time to get ready to make some great memories! Moon photography might seem easy because the moon is something we can go outside and see almost any night. But learning how to photograph it is a different story. Let alone, in an artistic way! Here's what happened on my three attempts to artistically capture this incredibly elusive subject!

There are so many factors involved in trying to photograph the moon that I'm not even going to try to explain them all here. Instead, below are some resources you can use as you seek to go about fulfilling the assignment, Moon Scenery.

• Whether you have never photographed the moon before, or have tried photographing it many times, PhotoPills does a great job of explaining absolutely everything you need to know about photographing any phase of the moon. Here is their Moon Photography: The Definitive Guide. And it's certainly definitive! But don't let it overwhelm you. Take things one step at a time, and don't worry about their emphasis on finding the "perfect" location to shoot the moon. They're just trying to show you how amazing their app is so that you'll buy it. 🙂
• As amazing as it can be, the commonplace dime-a-dozen photo of a giant moon all by itself against a black sky is not what Ziesemer Family Publishers want. They want scenery with a moon in it. How to accomplish this? Here are two simple articles by Marty Knapp that will help you know how to include the moon in your landscape photos: How to Photograph the Moon in the Landscape, and Predicting and Planning Your Moon Photographs.

When shooting for this assignment, my goal was to photograph the moon with the landscape without having to do any special HDR shooting or photo merging. I wanted to take one single photo that I could tweak like normal in Lightroom and see detail in the moon and in the foreground.This proved to be tougher than I thought. That first time I tried to photograph the moon, it happened to be a perfectly cloudy day. Plus, the location I had scouted was closed at the time of day I wanted to shoot the moon! And it was so rainy and cloudy thereafter that I never saw the moon full again until a month later.The next full moon found me in Connecticut visiting family. I was determined to get a good picture this time! But again, rain and clouds threatened to wash away my lofty intentions. So, I photographed on either side of the full moon: once two days before the full moon (before the clouds rolled in), and once the day after the full moon (as the clouds were going away).Here are my photos from the waxing side of the full moon. Sadly, it wasn't that great of a location because I wasn't able to line up the foreground elements with the moon like I was hoping. I was able to get at least one "single shot" photo, however. I was able to tweak the raw photo like normal in Lightroom and see just enough detail in the moon and in the foreground.Above is the raw shot, below is the one I tweaked in Lightroom.I also got the following shot. It's OK, but the foreground is basically a silhouette. It was too long after sunset for there to be much ambient light to help make the foreground brighter. Not a bad photo. Just not what I was going for.Again, above is the raw shot, below is the one I tweaked in Lightroom. (I hope seeing the before/after like this helps you not be so discouraged with your own raw photos. 🙂 )Many minutes elapsed between the above photo and the photo I tried to set up of the seond barn. This meant the foreground was even darker and the moon even brighter. The dynamic range between the two was just too great for my camera to capture in a single shot. Below is the best I could do in Lightroom to make it work, but it looks dark and the editing looks kinda fake.In the "before" shot above, it might look like I have washed out the moon. However, because I was shooting in RAW, the exposure was just dark enough that I was able to recover the detail in the moon. Looking at my bracketed photos, just one stop brighter (1/5sec instead of 1/10sec) and the moon was washed out beyond recovery.I was grateful that I had been able to actually photograph the moon this time. But the location wasn't as good as I had hoped and I felt like I had arrived a bit late. The foreground wasn't bright enough to get the "single shot" photos I was going for.So, I tried one more time!I spent hours searching for our final destination. We needed an unobstructed view to the east with surroundings and subjects that would work with a telephoto lens. Finally, we decided on a location: the parking lot of a local university. When we arrived, it was a whole lot more cloudy than I was expecting! But there was nothing we could do but wait it out. A sliver of open space on the horizon did give us some hope! Evidently, I wasn't the only photographer around who thought that location was a good spot to shoot the moon. As we were waiting, another photographer walked up with his tripod and telephoto lens. He suggested we move to the top of a nearby parking garage, though, and that was a great idea! It helped us get us a little bit more elevation. Even though a mountain known as Sleeping Giant prevented us from being able to see straight to the horizon where the moon would be coming up, we all knew we were at the best place we could be. So we just waited. And miraculously, that sliver of open space on the horizon was just wide enough to let us see the moon slip through over the mountain before it disapeared behind the clouds for the rest of the night.We certainly made a good memory that night. 🙂

Now It's Your Turn!

I don't feel I totally succeeded in any of these three photoshoots. I got some good moon photos, but I didn't get the "perfect" one. But that's ok! It's a great motivation for me to keep going out and trying some more! May you find the same thing to be true for you as you go and seek to capture the perfect shot of "Moon Scenery" for this assignment!

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