MOON SHOTS are a somewhat new addition to my portfolio. But sun and moon so often play a preeminent role in the landscape photographers' palette. Whenever I think of the topic, an earwig comes to mind: "Sunrise; sunset" the duet sung by Tevye and Golde in Fiddler on The Roof, whic motivated my post title here.😄 I have shot the moon before. I even have a really nice moonset image I made a few years back on Pete's Lake in The Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan's U.P. The inclusion of the moon in that shot was a lucky coincidence. We were up there for fall foliage photography and were set up on a pier on "Pete's Lake," in the national forest. I was working a shot of fall foliage reflecting in the lake, rather brightly lit by that very moon. As such the moon itself rendered as a mostly detail-less blown out shot. Effective, nontheless in my view. But that was happenstance. We had arrived in the pre-dawn twilight to shoot a sunrise. I had never really planned to shoot moon shots, and at the time really had no idea of the position of the moon or its phase.
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| Turtlehead Pond - Groton State Forest - Marshfield, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2021 - All Rights Reserved |
RICH, ON the other hand, had given it some thought. Sunrise and sunset almost always play a pivotal role in planning a shoot. But with Rich's planning, we purposefully set out to make some moonrise and moonset shots. I didn't really know much about it. There are a number of cell phone apps out there that will give you moonrise and moonset times and directions. There are a couple apps out there which can really help a photographer to plan shots like this. Photopills which, I am told, is a very good and effective tool, was originally available only for Apple (IOS) users, but later released its android version in 2017. We also have TPE (The Photographers' Ephemeris), an app which gives moon and sun rise and set calculations and a map, calibrated by time of the year. Its biggest plus for me is that it is very user-friendly and easy to learn. On this trip, we discovered from a fellow photographer, a new and really cool app: Planit Pro which does all of the above as well as creating a simulation showing the exact position of the moon and nearby features (like mountains, buildings, etc.). I haven't used it yet, but I downloaded it and I am sure I will. Photopills and particularly Planit Pro have rather steep learning curves. I have been watching a YouTub on Planit Pro, after being frustrated by what should be intuitive and easy tasks. It is deep, but I think once you get through the user interface, it may be the most comprehensive and useful of them all. Each of these tools has a cost, but given their utility, it is relatively nominal (Planit Pro, for example, charged me a one-time $10 fee (there is an additional $5 annual fee for its 3-D add-on, which to this point, I haven't felt the need for). Photopills is an $11 one-time charge. TPE has a one-time $10.00 charge for android and IOS apps. Its wegb-based product is free. For planning, I really like the web-based version.
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| Moonrise - Turtlehead Pond - Groton State Forest - Marshfield, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
OUR FIRST planned shoot was over Turtlehead Pond, in Marshfield, in the Groton State Forest. Turtlehead is a very rustic pond, which might be kayakable, but is not really a recreational pond. There are hiking trails around it. But its real shining moment comes when conditions right during fall foliage seasons for photography. Especially if there is some fog. It creates a spectacular canvas for a photographer, with a low mountain backdrop and a flatwater pond full of reflection opportunities. Carol Smith introduced me to it. If you drove back there during mid-day you would be forgiven if you dismissed it. But if you are there for a sunrise, replete with fog, you almost want to actively applaud. It is that photogenic. The first photo above illustrates the potential, even though it has little to do with a moon rise or set. We were also hoping for relatively clear conditions at the point where we would have the moon in our composition. The clear challenge was preserving enough light to position the moon higher in the sky. We lost that battle as we descended into full darkness. Getting the exposure that we did involved dialing our ISO way up. Some pixel-peeping will show a significant amount of noise in these images. I did use noise reduction in all of the moonrise images in post processing.
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| Moonrise - Turtlehead Pond - Groton State Forest - Marshfield, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
OUR PLANNING could have been better, but the moon thing was only on the back burner, and we weren't really focused on it. Too bad. Had we been more focused, we would have realized that just 2-3 days before, the moonrise was only minutes behind the sunset (and, conversely, the moonset only minutes before the sunrise). I have recently read that when they are so close together and you are very close to a full moon, the contrast between moonlit and sunlit items are at a low point, making exposure much less a challenge. In just the couple days we were late, that time difference had increased to about 30-60 minutes. What that meant was that it would be nearly impossible to get decent exposure of the dark areas and the brightly lit moon in a single exposure.
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| Moonrise - Turtlehead Pond - Groton State Forest - Marshfield, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
THE OTHER challenge is the postition of the moon. Rich's app told him it should rise behind the background mountain. But beyond that, precision was lacking. And, we knew it would move laterally a small amount as it rose. I was surprised though, that it did not move as much as I thought it would. I saw more movement a day later when we tried the same excercise at Peacham. More on that below. On the above image, given the challenge of thickening clouds and the position of the moon, I tried to focus more on the reflection of the moon. This is all stuff I hadn't previously given much thought to. I can readily see the value of pre-planning these shots using the phone apps as tools. Either way, I hope to have another chance at this one some day.
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| Moonset over A.M. Foster Bridge - Cabot, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
KNOWING WE were working against the clock now (each day the separation between sun and moon times was growing longer), we decided we should try our luck at a moonset image the very next morning. We had agreed that the A.M. Foster Bridge could make a good moonset shot, if we could get the moon reasonably near the bridge before the sun came up and things got too bright. And, we could kill two birds, here, by waiting just a few minutes for the sunrise. It is a front lit sunrise shot, so mainly looking for warm light and tones on the bridge. It was a pretty successful morning overall.
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| Moonset over A.M. Foster Bridge - Cabot, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
ARRIVING ON Cabot Plains Road, we scouted our scene, and then stood and waited for the sun to "drop" low enough to fit into our frames and compositional objectives. As we did that, we could see some substantial low-hanging cloud cover in the twilight. As things brightened, exposure would again become a challenge at the same time. I decided to use the cloud cover to partially obscure the moon. I "bet" that there would be an opening below the first layer of clouds, and hoped that it would be clear enough for the moon to show through. It did, but there is a certain "Where's Waldo" quality to my shots here. The moon is so small that it doesn't play the part I would have liked it to. Rich did a much better job. Using his longest lens to compress the perspective, his shot rendered the moon larger in the image and things closer. It required a crop of the barn, but it worked well. I need more practice and more pre-planning and thought. On my next outing, I will expiriment with a much longer lens and think about giving the moon a more prominent role in the composition.
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| Sunrise - A.M. Foster Bridge - Cabot, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
I KNOW that my next attempt at a "moon landing" will be different. Certainly better planned. But equally importantly, some thought about the role I want the moon to play in the image. So far, these shots have made the moon part of the image. Emphasizing it, as Rich did in his image linked above, means making the moon bigger in the overall image. I didn't do that here. What primarily draws the eye, though, is probably really the fact that in all of them, the moon is the brightest part of the image. It harkens back to my comment a couple blogs ago that there were "two" images in my scenic - a "landscape/context" image and a more intimate, close-in image. Here, I could choose to make the images more about the moon, but it would mean I would have to think about framing and context more carefully. The end result of my shot of the church steeple in Peacham, below, is my best illustration of what I mean. More in a bit.
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| Sunrise - A.M. Foster Bridge - Cabot, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
WE KNEW that we would be seeing the warm a.m. sun lighting the A.M. Foster Bridge (see what I did there? 😆) in just minutes after we lost the moon behind the clouds and ultimately the mountains. That was our "two-fer" that morning. Having already made sunset shots, and daytime shots here a few times, I spent my waiting time looking for a compostion that would give me an opportunity to play around with my new camera's "image stacking" feature (those familiar with the concept and the camera know it doesn't really "stack" them at all, but it does have a really smart algorithm for "bracketing" them). I have a separate blog post in the planning stages that will address this whole currently "hot" topic. For now, my conclusion is that its utility is much less broad than many commentors and posters would lead us to believe. There are a few things that make "stacking" a challenge. Some of them (particularly wind) were present here. While the two shots here seem repetitive, I added both to show how the subtle changes in the image and lighting affect the image as the sun comes up (notably in the sky and the foreground).
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| Moonrise - Peacham, Vermont Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
THE FOLLOWING evening, we headed to my own little piece of Vermont "Heaven:" Peacham. We thought the church steeple would make a good "foil" for the moon during its rise. My first thought was to try to frame the moon with the iconic scene in the photo. That probably would have been possible just a few days before. But Rich pointed out to me that at that time, the setting of the sun and the rise of the moon would have been mere minutes apart. In just 2-3 days, that gap widened to well over an hour. Wow! Lots for me to learn and ingest here. That little detail will be in my mind on my next landscape outinhg (or conditions permitting, citi-scape). One of the things I have learned is that you need to have a good shooting position. The slope of the field in Peacham creates an ideal shooting stage for the photographer. Additionally, I really needed to move my camera position a couple times to get the moon where I wanted it. I never really did. I had to be satisfied with "this is as close as I am going to get this trip." Making minute movements of the tripod in tall grass in the pitch dark, while trying to maintain focus at 400mm? A real challenge.
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| Peacham, Vermont Moonrise Copyright Andy Richards 2025 - All Rights Reserved |
AS WELL, we were, unfortunately, facing the exact same issues we faced just a couple evenings earlier at Turtlehead Pond. By the time the moon appeared to us it was going to be essentially dark in the rest of the photo. This meant the was really no way we were going to get any detail in the moon. As you can see in the first image, it is really just a white, mostly blown out disk. This time though, I had my new long lens mounted and was ready to try to make a bigger moon. Later in the evening, I put the 2x on and did my best to shoot and properly expose that moon, which I would use for the a composite above first getting the moon placed where I wanted it and then replacing the blown out white disc with my reasonably well-exposed moon shot.
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