Here’s an image of the moon rising of Revere Beach around 10PM on June 29, 2018. I’d like to use it as an album cover someday, perhaps.
I got to Revere Beach just as the moon was rising and struggled to set up my camera equipment in time to capture the dramatic moment. As the moon emerged above the horizon it really was shockingly, gobsmackingly red. But I couldn’t get it into focus and my first dozen shots didn’t capture any of its red brilliance.
As the moon continued ascending, it became brighter and easier to photograph, and its color changed to golden and eventually white.
Straight out of my camera, the shot here was underexposed and much less saturated than in the edited version I’m presenting. In a sense, the red here is artificial. When the moon had reached the height shown in this image, it was not nearly as red. Still, this processed and fantastical image represents something of the drama of the scene as I experienced it, with that intense red from the first moments of moonrise lingering in mind even as the color progressed toward white.
This next image is probably the most technically good photo of the moon I’ll be able to capture in a while. I took it on June 20, 2018 in East Boston. Since my last blog post where I wrote about photographing birds without a telephoto lens, I’ve actually acquired a telephoto lens, and this moon image is one of the first things I’ve been able to do that I couldn’t do before. It’s shot on a 50mp full frame camera at 600mm. 1/320 sec at f / 6.3. ISO 125. Tripod. Manual focus. Remote shutter release. Post-processing to adjust brightness and contrast. Cropped.
I’ve tried a few times just to get another photo like this, but I’ve been encumbered by clouds, fog, wind (leading to a shaking tripod), and other hindrances that made it non-trivial to just go out and get this same photo again. I have a teleconverter that can get me up to 840mm but I’m not yet sure the optical quality is good enough to make the extra reach worthwhile for moon photography. So here’s what I got for now:
■