Moon Dance
Moon Dance
Clearly Moon Dance is a composite image. It came about with my fascination of the moon and thinking just how many different ways I could photograph it. Captured over a 24 day (or night) period, I decided to embark on a specific series of shots for a specific project.
A full moon is obviously brighter than a waning crescent and every photograph has slightly different settings. But where possible I kept things consistent. The amount of light entering the sensor is what makes an image, so all 24 shots needed to be adjusted in camera as much as possible to keep the consistency across the series. F stop was fixed at 6.3 and focal length constantly at 600mm. Only the sutterspeed varied between shots and the ISO adjusted a few times as all were handheld captures and shutter speed needed to be above 1/180 for clarity.
Over the month the moon rises and sets at different times of the evening and rotates its face through the course of its journey. Using an invaluable app - Photopills - I calculated the moon phasing percentage each night and plotted this onto a graph to create a symmetrical phasing pattern. Cloud cover obviously was another contributing factor and each night I would check the weather conditions, predict the best time to capture the moon, then set an alarm for the middle of the night if needed to keep the series alive. I took one image in the garbage yard amount the fleet of trucks, while another was taken at the local 7-11 at 4.30am while grabbing a coffee. Those where the best times to take that particular photo so I made the necessary arrangements.
The 15 images used were blended using Luminar NEO with only the full moon photo adjusted slightly to better match the other darker images. A sharpening tool was lightly applied to bring out the full definition of the surface craters and scars. There are many more photos to the series but the difference in subject size was negligible and didn’t warrant inclusion.
The name Moon Dance came to me one night while grabbing an image in the wee small hours. The moon does dance across the sky every evening, and performs a monthly dance building to a crescendo, then working back down to a blackened sky once more.
600mm. f/6.3. 1/180 - 1/300 sec. ISO 100-400.
Daily percentage of moon visibility over the month