Moon Over Memorial
So how do you get a shot like this of the rising full moon, resting on the roof of the front portico of the Jefferson Memorial? (And looking like a big orange marble ready to roll down that sloping roof and – plunk! – into the Tidal Basin.)
It’s actually not hard. The secret is what the real estate agents call the three rules for pricing a home on the market: Location, location, location.
And timing.
The three locations for any moon shot are: (1) the subject you want to pair with the moon: a memorial, a mountain, whatever; (2) the place where you and your camera are situated; and (3) the time and the path of the moon across the sky.
Below is a screenshot from PhotoPills, an inexpensive, essential tool for any photograph when you’re hoping to situate the moon, the sun, or even the Milky Way (really late at night in a really dark location far from any city lights) next to any interesting foreground object. Think of PhotoPills as Google Earth overlaid with sun and moon data, plus other cool night sky stuff like Milky Way location and meteor showers.
This screenshot is an overhead view of the Washington DC Tidal Basin, labeled with the major landmarks around the rim. This shows the time and location of one shot in the sequence that included the image at the top of this blog post: 10:06 pm on June 4, 2023 (see the bottom strip of the screenshot for time and date). In the upper left you see an orange pin. That’s the shooting location (here, standing just in front of the Martin Luther King Memorial on the edge of the Tidal Basin). The target location, the subject we’re focusing our camera on, is at the black pin, which as you can see is roughly centered at the top of the Jefferson Memorial’s dome.
Notice the two light blue lines across the basin, starting together at our shooting location at the orange pin, and spreading a bit apart by the time they reach the Jefferson Memorial in the lower right. The thick blue line is the angle (azimuth) of the moon from the north when it hits the horizon. As it climbs, the moon doesn’t go straight up – it arcs across the sky. On PhotoPills, the thin blue line moves clockwise showing the moon’s angle from north at any minute after moonrise. Here, we see the thin blue line just grazing past the top of the Memorial’s dome at 10:06 pm on June 4. The angle (azimuth) of the moon in the sky at that time is 130.7 degrees from north. (North is zero degrees, east is 90, south 180, and west 270.)
How do I know the exact azimuth number? Take a look at the data on the upper right of the PhotoPills screenshot. Below is an enlargement of the relevant piece.
You can see the moon’s azimuth (middle bunch of data) is 130.7 degrees. Ah, but there’s more! You also see in this block of data the elevation (height) of the moon from the horizon in both degrees and feet above the subject memorial. The moon is at 3.30 degrees elevation, or 26 apparent feet above the top of the Memorial. This data set also gives you the size of the moon in comparison to your subject building, plus a lot of other data like the times for the sun and moon to rise and set, and how far from north (azimuth) they will be when they reach the horizon going both up and down.
Now, here is the image I got at that 10:06 time shown on the screenshot. Notice how the moon is a few feet higher and to the right of the image at the top of this post, which was snapped at 10:00 pm. That’s how much the moon arced above the Memorial in six minutes.
By the way, notice how the bottom of the moon is just 30 feet or so to the left of the peak of the dome? I could have centered the moon exactly over the dome at that moment, by the simple move of grabbing my tripod and moving my camera roughly 30 feet to the right, which would have moved the apparent location of the moon by an equal number of feet. (But then I would have messed up the timelapse shot I show below.)
To make the moon’s movement a little more clear – and dramatic! – here is a timelapse image I put together by overlaying five images, which spanned nine minutes from the lower left moon to the upper center.
The only way to get this timelapse shot is to hold the camera’s position rock-still for the entire sequence. Another reason why you have to use a tripod.
Now, here’s just one more image from this photo shoot. This one was taken at 9:56 pm, four minutes before the image at the top of this post. Where is the moon?
Yes, that’s it, just peeking above the tree line at the far left of the image. It’s about to start climbing up over the front portico of the Memorial. Of course, PhotoPills told me it was going to be exactly there at that time. But seeing it actually happen, right on schedule? That’s a rush!
Here are a few more moon shots I’ve taken in our nation’s capital. That’s the Capitol dome with a three-quarter moon, a Washington Monument shot through fog, and Memorial Bridge with Arlington House.
Opportunities like this abound all over the United States – heck, all over the world – every month of the year.
Let’s end this blog post with a Q&A of your questions and my answers:
Q. Why was the moon so orangey in color?
A. That goes with how high in the sky it is. I’ve found that when the moon is low near the horizon, it is nearly always yellow or orange (unless the sky is already lit from the sun). You’re looking through more atmosphere when it’s close to the horizon, and the atmosphere filters out the blue wave lengths. If you look at the Washington Monument shot in the group a few paragraphs above, the moon is a more typical pewter gray. When I was there, the moon was setting, and a few minutes later when the moon was closer to the top of the Monument, it turned orange.
Q. Why the vertical composition?
A. I wanted to focus tightly on the building, leaving room at the top for the moon to arc across, and room in the foreground for any reflections on the water. That’s why the vertical orientation.
Q. Where do you focus, on the moon or your foreground subject?
A. If the subject is far enough away, both it and the moon will be at infinity focus. NB: Infinity is not just cranking your focus ring all the way to the furthest it will go. Infinity is a notch or so before that. Each lens is different, but it’s best to look at your focus on a live view on the back of the camera, and enlarge the moon or your subject while nudging the focus ring just a hair to make it as sharp as possible.
If you have to choose between a sharp moon or a sharp subject, you usually want the moon sharp.
Another way to get both foreground and moon in sharp focus is to take two photos – one with the focal point on the foreground and the other on the moon – and blend them together in PhotoShop. With these moon shots at the Tidal Basin, I could – and should! – have taken at least one exposure focused on the waves in the foreground. I just didn’t think of it at the time. Hey, I was moonstruck!
Q. What were your exposure settings and why did you pick them?
A: Shutter speed is the trickiest, because you have to remember the moon is moving constantly. You want a fast enough shutter speed to prevent any motion blur but also slow enough to pick up the shadowy details of the subject you’re pairing with the moon. The longer your lens and the bigger the moon is in your viewfinder, the faster your shutter speed needs to be. I find that 1/8 of a second is a pretty safe bet to thread that needle.
Other settings: I used an aperture of f/8 to try to get a little more depth of field than wide open. I used ISO 400. Base ISO of 64 would have produced way too dark of an image. Higher ISO’s (like above 1,000) would give you more noise. Again, it’s a balancing act.
Q. What focal length of lens works best?
A. Usually the biggest, longest lens you have. If you’re a mile or more from your subject, you want 600 mm focal length or higher to get details on your subject. I was only half a mile from the Jefferson Memorial, so I could use a 100-400 mm zoom lens and didn’t even need the full 400 mm. The Jefferson shots in this blog post are all around 310 mm.
But take a look again at the U.S. Capitol shot with the three-quarter moon. I was 1.8 miles away, so I used a full 600 mm focal length lens.
Q. Why is the moon so much bigger in comparison to the Capitol dome than it is in comparison to the Jefferson dome?
A. Good question! It’s entirely a function of how far your camera is from the subject. The further apart they are – i.e., the further away you can stand from your subject – the bigger the moon will look compared to your subject.
The Capitol shot distance of 1.8 miles gave me an apparent moon diameter of about 82 feet. I knew that from my PhotoPills data, but if you look at the shot and realize the Capitol dome’s diameter is 96 feet, you can see that’s pretty close to accurate.
The diameter of the Jefferson dome is 165 feet. PhotoPills tells us that when we’re standing half a mile away, the moon diameter is 26 feet compared to the building it’s next to. The data set I excerpted above shows that the distance between where I was standing (orange pin) and the top of the Jefferson’s dome (black pin) was 2703.9 feet, a little over half a mile.
Q. What if there are too many clouds to see the moon?
A. Unless the clouds are really socked in, don’t give up. All you need is clear skies at the horizon. But if it’s a total bust, just remember : Tomorrow! The time of moonrise will be different, by an hour or so, and the angle it comes up on the horizon will differ by a few degrees, which will change your shooting location. Both are easily calculated with PhotoPills.
For the moonrise shots in this post, rainy weather prevented a good shot on both of the prior two evenings. If you look at the data box, you will see that the moon, on the night where the sky was finally clear, was a hair off from being 100% “full.” See in the middle box of data, where it says “waning gibbous 98.7%.” So don’t give up trying if you’re a day or two off from the moon’s fullness. And don’t forget that crescent moon shots can be gorgeous too.
Q. How do I learn more?
A. My goal in this blog post is to give you a taste for how you can pull off one of these shots. There is a lot more to learn!
You might have seen photos of the moon resting on the crown of the Statue of Liberty, or sitting on the tip of the Empire State Building. Jennifer Khordi, a photographer based in northern New Jersey, is the mastermind behind many of those iconic New York moon shots. Here is a video of Khordi describing how to use the PhotoPills app to set up and execute these moon shots. I also recommend you read the PhotoPills moon photography guide, both of which have the bonus of showing off some amazing images to inspire you, so that you too can get the shot.