The background photo (wallpaper) on the desktop of my PC has a breath-taking shot of a mountain in the foreground and a large moon (apparently) rising in the background. Maybe you’ve seen it. Anyway…
What kind of lens and setting would one use to capture all the details of the mountain and still be able to capture such a large image of the moon? Wouldn’t one need a long focal length to capture any respectable image of the moon precluding such a (relatively) wide-angled shot?
Or, is this photo a superimposition of the two images???
Yeah, I figured it would HAVE to be. IMHO, there’s no lens that has such an extreme range of features to capture such an image!
Now, if I could only master the trick to photograph motion…especially when the moving subject appears still (unblurred) but the background is blurred! What a cool shot that makes! - Jinx
In general, it’s hard to get the exposure right for the moon and landscape details. The moon is actually much brighter than one would think, and a long exposure time wipes out all the detail. However, a sunlit mountain taken with a long lens just at sunset might be one of those circumstances where the light is just right to expose both correctly. So without seeing the picture it’s difficult to say whether it was done with or without darkroom magic.
For the motion effect, I’m pretty sure (based on fuzzy recollection from photography books read many years ago) that the effect is done with a medium to slow speed shutter action (1/60 or 1/30?) and panning, or following, the action of moving item.
On reflection, does your “master the trick” mean that you know this technique but just need to get proficient at it?
This isn’t an easy shot but I can easily see that if it was taken just after sunset/moonrise the range of light to dark could be easily captgured. Doesn’t even take a particualy long lens. The moon is about half a degree across and takes about 1/4 the vertical dimension of the frame which works out somewhere around 700mm focal length.
Mycroft H., it just takes practice. You need to get a feel for how steady you can hold a camera with a particular lens. Motion blur will depends on the angle of view of the lens so start with the old 1/focal length rule and use shutter speeds at least a couple of stops slower than that.
a) For photographing the moon, I’ll have to play with the numbers based on my equipment and results. I have a super-telephoto, but I forget its f-length. Also, I it can mount to doubling lens making for some nice shots, but narrow range of field. (In short, it really needs a finderscope!)
b) For photographing an object in the foreground and a decent moon image in the background, I guess you have to be far enough away so the lens is focused at
infinity? Or, focus the lens so that the upper end of depth of field lies at infinity?
c) As for the motion effect, I understand you are suppose to pan the camera with the moving object, but wouldn’t you get a lot of “camera shake”? Maybe the pro’s have a well-greased tripod for getting a smooth motion when panning. While we’re at it…does a monopod do much to dampen out “camera shake”?
Here is a (very small and compressed) picture I took in Tasmania. At full size you can see lots of detail on the moon. Obviously this was a bit easier as it was taken in the daytime. This was taken at full zoom with an Olympus UZ-2100 digital camera, which is roughly equivalent to a 350mm zoom on a 35mm SLR.
I was some distance from the mountain - it’s difficult to see the scale but those rocks are BIG - see the size of the trees growing amongst them.
I’m sure there are cites about the actual technique he used for this photograph, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a superimposition. Here says something about using a deep red filter.
A little more Googling finds this discussion of how he did it.
As I said it doen’t require such an increedibly long lens that you’d need a finder scope. As I said 700mm if you don’t crop the frame. Crop the center section and it could easily be done with a lens of half that focal length.
That is referred to as hyperfocal distance. I don’t even think you’d need that as most mountains will effectively be at “infinity” for the purpose of focus.
I find it more difficult to use a tripod for that kind of work. I have sometimes used a monopod but it pretty much limits you to panning in the axis of the pole. It really isn’t that difficult to do this handheld as you seem to think it is. Smoothness helps of course but shake is pretty much a non-issue. You really need to concentrate on matching the direction and speed of the camera movement to the object you’re tracking. That is the beauty of digital since you can practice these techniques with instant feedback and no incremental cost. I don’t have them here but I’ll dig up some nice motion blur background shots of mounted cowboy shooters. Don’t think you have to avoid all motion blur on the subject to get a good shot. Lots of motion in the background and a little on the subject often gives the best impression of motion.
Re: the moon
Pretty much all the basics have been covered by the answers. If you see a nighttime picture of the moon with both the foreground and background properly exposed with a good range of detail, it’s almost certainly a double exposure or photo montage. Remember, as the moon is lit up by the sun, to expose for it you follow the “Sunny 16” to rule (i.e. the ballpark correct exposure for anything lit by the full sun is 1/ISO at f/16.) Therefore, when shooting at 100 ISO, the “correct” exposure for the moon is 1/100 (or 1/125 or 1/60) at f/16. Now, almost all of your foreground, except for pinpricks of lights that may exist in your scene, will be completely black at such an exposure. You’d have to expose your film/CCD for at least a few seconds before you’d get any detail at that ISO and f-stop.
The old photographer trick used to be to shoot a roll of film of the moon with a telephoto (100-300 mm), carefully rewind the film, and superimpose cityscapes shot with a wide lens over the initial images. I’m sure you’ve seen posters like this before: huge moon in the frame, perfectly exposed, with a lit-up cityscape surrounding it. This can be done in-camera or during the printing process by sandwiching negs.
re: motion blur
Panning is one way of doing this. If the picture is taken during the day or with sufficient light, it’s almost certainly just panning and slow shutter speeds. If it’s a nighttime picture involving flash, then it’s a technique called rear-curtain (or possibly front-curtain/slow) sync. In rear- acurtain sync, you expose for the ambient light and then pop a flash at the end to light (and freeze) the foreground. (With front/slow-sync, the flash pops at the beginning) The technique works best when your subject is in a relatively dark spot and the background is well-lit. Look at the bike photo on this page. While the photo is a daytime photo, it is pretty clearly flashed and taken in a shady spot allowing the possibility of rear-curtain sync.
First of all, Ansel Adams may well have used a yellow or red filter that did not cover the entire frame. This is a fairly common practice, and can yield very vivid results when photographing elements that are lit in radically different ways ( such as the moon and a darkened mountain). Here is a page that shows some of the finest Grad Filters in the world. Some are colored, some are a graduated filter using ND only. ( ND= Neutral Density. That is to say, it does not color the image. It only darkens the image to a set amount, using a grading instead of a hard line between clear and ND ).
As for the OP asking about focus. Remember that Infinity is Infinity. If you are 3 miles away from a mountain and the moon is whateverthehell the moon is away from us, once you have set your lens to Infinity, all elements past the maximum focus are in focus. I can shoot in a forest and if I am more than say, 400 yards from the closest tree, all of the trees will resolve in focus. You can fiddle around with this using a long lens and looking at different elements in your frame. Past a certain distance, Infinity is Infinity.
I would guess that the images you are seeing are shot with a grad ND filter. The moon is an incredibly well-lit object. In fact, it is lit by sunlight even though we are experiencing nighttime. Quite a ratio of light there !!
In my experience, effective motion blur depends on a number of factors: the speed of the moving object, its distance from you, and from the background (which will provide the a large part of the blur effect). Somebody somewhere has probably figured this all out mathematically, but in my trial and error fashion, I’ve found that you don’t always need an especially slow shutter speed to get a satisfactory effect.
Here are a few samples from my own collection. This is the Champ Car race at Mid-Ohio in 2002. Each of these files is the full-size original image, with no sharpening or other processing. Each is about a megabyte.
Padeye’s right that a tripod isn’t very helpful, and a monopod isn’t really necessary, either. It’s just a matter of learning to make a smooth pan that follows the object. He’s also right that digital has made mastering that technique and finding the right shutter speed much easier and cheaper. The year before I got the digital camera I used to shoot these pictures, I shot ten or twenty short rolls testing various speeds at various locations in practice sessions to get the right settings for the race.
For the first three shots above, the cars were going relatively slowly through the “keyhole.” IIRC, I ended up using a shutter speed of about 1/90. At the place where I shot Junquiera, the cars were going faster, and it was harder to get a good shot. I had to use a higher shutter speed to keep the car sharp, so the blur wasn’t as pronounced.
But unless you’re a much better photographer than me (which is entirely possible), it’s still something of a crapshoot. I found that for every shot that looks like this (Tora Takagi), I got three or four that look like this. But with digital, who cares?
Thank you. However, to address your point, even with ND filters, they tend to only accomodate a 3-stop difference. (At least I’ve never seen one more extreme than this). When dealing with the moon and a night scene, we’re dealing with something well outside a 3-stop difference in lighting. Pointing my camera outside (relatively well-lit city street), I get a reading of 15 sec at f/16, 100 ISO. That’s a 10 to 11 stop difference from the moon. So it’s still rather unlikely that an ND filter is being employed in the OP’s photo. Although it’s certainly possible—it all depends on what time the picture is taken. However, most of the stereotypical images that come to mind with moon & mountain are double exposures. The fact that the moon is huge in the frame suggest that to be the case. But I cannot be sure without seeing the photograph.
Real photo Notice how completely blown out the moon is, and how even the foreground detail is still underexposed. This is what would happen if you attempted a straight moon shot
Another real photo. This one has a lot of color and detail in the mountains. Still, the moon is absolutely featureless. You can’t get such detail in both fore- and background because the exposure difference is far too extreme.
Did anyone notice that this shot was made while the sun is still up? It isn’t a full moon which means it isn’t directly opposite the sun. It’s also near the horizon which means it isn’t midnight. The direction the moon is illuminated from is above the horizon. I’m sure an astronomer can correct me if I’m wrong but I think this photo was taken in the summer in the northern hemisphere just after sunrise/before moonset. I don’t think this photo required any “trickery” even as trivial as an ND filter and could easily be done with a sufficiently long lens.
Which picture are you talking about here? There have been so many linked here that I’m confused!
The picture I took (which I linked to before) was taken in late afternoon/early evening - you can see that the sun angle was fairly low by the illumination of the moon. It’s difficult to tell from the very small image I linked too, but the moon is pretty well exposed: presumably it reflects a similar amount of light to the sunlit rock in the foreground. I didn’t use any kind of filter, apart from the UV filter I always keep on to protect the lens.
For me, I just liked the way the moon appears to nestle perfectly in that notch in the mountain.
Incidentally, here’s another photo from the same trip - you can see that exposing for the night-time city (well, overexposing if I’m honest) completely blows out the moon - it almost looks like the sun (Also note the aeroplane with its flashing lights which left a trail to the left of the moon.)
The moon strikes me as being a bit too sharp, considering the amount of mist around. But I suppose its brightness could be enough to cut through the haze. Something about this shot just strikes me as fake, though.
If so, I agree with Padeye’s comments. Basically, the lighting on the moon should be the same as the lighting on the mountain. If the moon is lit from above right (as it clearly is), the mountain should be too.
If the moon is near the horizon at time of sunrise or sunset, either it’s almost full and directly opposite the sun, or it’s a thin crescent very close to where the sun has just set (or about to rise). The moon in this photo is neither.
Oops, I misread/misunderstood Padeye’s post. I don’t think it’s real. Let me start over:
The moon is 3/4 full and the lit side is pointing up. This would indicate the sun is high in the sky. As Padeye said, it’s consistent with a photo taken during the day as the moon is very low in the sky.
However, the mountain shows no shadows or highlights. It’s obviously lit by a diffuse source - a cloudy or twilight sky. Judging from the lack of major clouds and the purple tint of the sky, I think it’s more likely to be a photo taken in twilight.
So I think the phase and position of the moon is inconsistent with the lighting on the m ountain. The easiest explanation is that someone pasted the shot of the moon onto the photo of a twilight landscape.
(Also note the aeroplane with its flashing lights which left a trail to the left of the moon.)
