Summit County Citizens Voice

Sweet moonrise in Colorado

Floating on a bed of clouds.

FRISCO — Catching the full moon rise is always a special treat, especially when there are some wispy clouds in the sky to help frame the glowing orb. But trying to expose properly for the sky, the moon and the foreground is tricky. More often than not, the moon ends up as a featureless white disk, unless you use special trickery, like multiple exposures or HDR. Saturday night, moon played peek-a-boo through several layers of clouds, so it was like watching the moon rise several times.

I had both DSLRs with me, as well as an iPhone. The older Canon with a somewhat sketchy 300 mm zoom did a decent job of capturing a semi-closeup of the moon floating on a bed of clouds in a one-second exposure, using a rock as a tripod – yes, I forgot the tripod when I jumped on the bike to get to the reservoir for the session. The iPhone camera, as much as I love it, definitely is not ideal for low-light landscape shots. Even with moderate lighting, it loses definition and gets grainy real fast. The workhorse Nikon did a decent job, but it was interesting to see how the colors and sharpness were affected as I jacked up the ISO setting.

I knew it was going to come up, and had an idea of what point on the horizon, but the clouds kept me guessing. When I finally say the rim of the orb emerge, I wasn’t in quite the best position, but it was too late to move.

Full, for a few minutes, before hiding in the next layer of clouds.

In between lighting in this shot, with dusk in the foreground, and a daylight blue sky between the clouds.

The Canon sensor and lens add a slightly different hue to scence.

Trying to crop the scene with the zoon lens while propping the camera on a rock led to this less-than-stellar composition. Always best to be prepared with a tripod when shooting low-light shots, but you do the best you can, right?

A slightly different scene Friday night. With better light balance, even shooting with an iPhone resulted in a decent picture, although the moon is overexposed.

The moon is only a faint spot of light in this iPhone shot. I really need to get me some of those Olloclip lenses, which I hear are for sale at Target now.

Filed under: Colorado, Morning photo, photography, Summit County Colorado Tagged: | Colorado, Full moon, IPhone, iPhoneography, mobile photography, moonrise, Summit County Colorado, Summit County photography