Moonset

I went out this morning to capture the setting of the moon. I’ve been trying to get some good shots of the full moon for a few days, but some uncharacteristic weather has thwarted me until now. It was a beautiful clear morning today with the moon nicely visible in the northwestern sky. All the pictures shown were taken between 7:30 am and 7:40 am. With the sun rising almost directly behind me, the good contrast between the moon and the sky was short lived. I had enough light to be able to clearly distinguish the trees and cacti in the foreground. But, as the sun rose the sky got lighter and the contrast between it and the moon weakened. By the time I left, the moon was virtually indistinguishable from its background.

Had I come earlier, the sun’s light would have been on the moon only, making it very bright. The pre-dawn surroundings, not yet illuminated would have been very dark and almost indistinguishable. Too much contrast for a picture of anything but the moon itself. The following three pictures were captured in the short period where the contrast was just right.

The above picture and the following one were both taken with the same camera settings; f11, ISO 160 and focal length 200 mm. I focused on the moon in both pictures and succeeded in getting its image very sharp. With an aperture setting of f11, the foreground is not as sharp as the moon, particularly in the second picture. The difference is attributable to my distance from the foreground, much further away in the first picture. Depth of field (range through which focus is sharp) is strongly influenced by the aperture size and the relative proximity of the subjects being photographed.

The less sharp focus does not make these bad pictures. It serves to put emphasis on the principal subject, the moon, allowing it to stand out from the surroundings. Having said that, my personal preference is to have both the moon and its surroundings quite sharp. For the final picture, I moved farther back from the cactus in the foreground and reduced the aperture to f22. Since I focused the lens on the moon, it is still sharper than the cactus in the foreground but the cactus’ sharpness is much more to my liking. I captured this last shot just before the moon paled to oblivion and called it a day.