Shooting the Moon

This past weekend an event happened known as a Supermoon. A supermoon occurs when a full moon coincides with the point at which the moon is closest to the Earth in its orbit. It appears largest shortly after rising. Unfortunately by the time I was tipped off about it, the moon was already high in the sky.  It was a very clear night so I took the chance to snap a shot of the noon with my new lens, the 70-200 L.  Here's the result:


This is more or less actual pixels.  I cropped out the majority of this photo, as the moon was still pretty small in my shot.  But look at the detail!  It's amazing to see the places where the moon has obviously been hit by asteroids or other heavenly bodies.

In any case, I figured the moon would still be pretty close to Earth the next night, so a bit of research informed me of the time of moonrise for Sunday night.  I took my new lens down to the mouth of the Rouge River in hopes of catching the moon rising over the lake.

It turned out to be an overcast night, but the moon was visible near the horizon, so I snapped a couple before it disappeared behind the clouds.

The result astounded me... upon leaving the shutter open for a few seconds, the scene lit up as if it were a sunrise or sunset. This has not been altered other than to straighten the horizon and to reduce the noise. The colour is as I saw it:


Of course, while this shot is amazing, nobody would ever believe this to be a moonrise scene.  So I recoloured a second one to look more like what you might see on a poster for a werewolf movie.


As always, click on these for larger versions.

 - jc