Every month, there’s a single day where the moon will rise during sunset which is one of the best times to shoot it. If you wait another day to shoot it, it will be too dark out and will be hard to see objects on the earth while the moon will be very bright. A day earlier and it’s still pretty bright outside and it’ll be hard to see the moon. The tricky thing with this is if it’s cloudy out, you won’t see the moon and have to wait until the next month. So far I’ve managed to have 2 months in the last 9 months where it wasn’t cloudy.

Location

This was shot in Manitowoc, WI in the marina. I find Lake Michigan is a perfect place to take pictures of the moon rising as you can see all the way to the horizon. Another bonus is there are many lighthouse to give the moon a sense of scale as you shoot it. The moon also rises very fast during this time and the entire sequence only lasts maybe 15-20 minutes.

Composition

At the horizon, it was just a bit cloudy, so I was just about to give up and drive home when all of a sudden I noticed the moon. I grabbed my tripod and ran into position to compose the shot. In the past I’ve tried to center the moon above the lighthouse, but this time I set it more to the right to balance things. When shooting the moon at the horizon, it’s best to use a pretty fast shutter speed as the moon is moving pretty fast.

Post Processing

While shooting, I tried to do some quick focus stacks as the rocks in front of the lighthouse were out of focus otherwise. With this, I took the two shots into Photoshop and blended the two shots which were focused differently with one another. After that I made the rest of my edits in Adobe Lighthouse using adjustment layers to change different aspects of the image. I also added some contrast, saturation & white balance to my RAW file. I also spent some time leveling the horizon and the lighthouse as well.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Focus Stacking

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