Over The Moon: In yesterday’s Ugly UHH there were various answers to the question of why certain photos show a very enlarged moon. Since moon pictures are a vague photographic...

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Over The Moon

Mar 19, 2023 18:14:20 #

MosheR Loc: New York City

In yesterday’s Ugly UHH there were various answers to the question of why certain photos show a very enlarged moon. Since moon pictures are a vague photographic interest, I decided to address that question.

Five of my moon shots follow this little explanation. The first four were not manipulated in any way, other than to do a little post processing to bring out the colors the way I wanted them to be, and to do little sharpening. The fifth photo was manipulated as I will describe.

If you use a hundred millimeter lens and a six foot person stands about ten feet away from you, with a large mountain range about twenty miles in the background, you could fill the frame from top to bottom with both the person and the mountains. However, if you step back so you’re twenty feet away from your subject, you would now have to use a two hundred millimeter lens to fill the frame with that person. In relation to those distant mountains, however, you barely budged, and they will now loom about twice as close and twice as large as they were in the first photo. And so on. This so called “telephoto” effect is easily seen if you watch a major league baseball game on television, where it seems as if the pitcher is virtually on top of the batter. The reason for this is that the cameraperson is somewhere way above center field, and is using a long lens to bring in those players, thus compressing the visual planes.

That’s how my first four photos were taken. Also, I usually try to get my moon shots while the sun is still out, either in the morning or the evening, and is directly on the opposite side of the sky from the moon. This serves to keep the moon low on the horizon, which is, to me, at least, much more visually interesting, and to give it the saturated color that I tend to favor.

For the post processing of the first four photos, I used Elements, with the NIK and Topaz filters, as I also did with the slightly manipulated fifth picture.

The shot of the vulture flying across the moon was taken in Ethiopia in 2008. It is actually a very cropped version of the original picture, which was of a group of these birds circling in the sky. When I got home I noticed that this one particular guy was passing just by the moon, so I cropped very s strongly to strengthen the shot. Since only PS was available to me back in 2008, I enlarged the picture slowly, increasing its size in finite steps, rather than doing it all at once. Not nearly as good a job as Topaz Gigapixel can now do in one easy step.

The moon setting over the red cliffs was taken in Bariloche, Argentina in 2015, just as the sun was rising. This is a simple long lens shot, post processed in Elements as described above. Same thing with the church steeple taken in Cuba in 2013.

The penguins were taken in 2015 in Godthul, on South Georgia Island, near Antarctica. If South Georgia Island sounds familiar, it’s because that’s where, after a long, perilous small boat journey, Ernest Shackleton found the whaling village that helped in the rescue of his marooned men. Anyway, the penguins were up on a high cliff, and the picture was taken with my lens zoomed out to 1345 mm, which really brought the moon in close.

The last picture was taken in Sorento, Italy in 2016. This was a view of the city from the window of the lovely little cottage in which my wife and I were staying. You can’t see it in this dark picture, but Mt. Vesuvius is there at the left.

Anyway, what I did was photograph the scene, then take another, much closer picture of the moon, which really was there at the time. Then I pasted the larger moon into the photo, and shrank it to what I considered to be a more reasonable, but still very large size.