Pixiq

Photographing the Moon on the evening that “officially” the perigee was reached, was not my best hour. But I had done the shot some 12 hours before.

The Moon was so close to us on Earth on the 19^th of March 2011 that everybody wanted to go out and take pictures. Being 14% bigger and with 30% more light, the moon was back on the same place it was some 18 years ago, on the 19^th January 1992. So, with another 18 years to go before it comes back again, people thought it was a good picture to take and keep.

The problem is that many people tried to expose for the available light and got shiny white discs on a black/grey background. Others tried with their little compacts and flash and did not get the shot. Even professional photographers with better gear could not do much more than use what light was available to get the picture.

The Moon was close but not so close that you could fill the whole frame with it. In fact it was at some 220 thousand miles when it usually is at 250. Not even with my EF 100-400mm I could fill the frame. So I had to look for a suitable framing solution, which I thought I knew beforehand.

I choose a high place to shoot from, but the Moon was not visible, for me, before 19 PM, one hour after it had officially risen in Portugal. Had it been one hour earlier and I could have a nice framing, as the place I had chosen had some high electric posts that would make for a good composition. But because I had been the whole day out leading a photography workshop I did not scout other possible locations than the one I had chosen. There I was, pitch black and the Moon over my head…

As a last minute solution I decided to frame one of the electric posts over the moon disc, so this is my perigee shot, taken at 1/200 f/5.6 at 400 ISO. I decided to go for the higher ISO in order to deal with the later afternoon breeze that could create vibration on the tripod used. I also used my usual settings: mirror locked before exposure and a 10 second delay before exposure.

Many people think that to expose for the Moon you need to do a long exposure, but that is not true. As the Moon is just a big reflector of the Sun, it should, at least in theory, be correctly exposed with the Sunny 16 rule (so 1/125 f/16 at 100 ISO). In the real world it is not true, as you’ll discover if you try, but it’s a good starting point so you don’t loose your bearings.

The picture I got from that afternoon is more a document than something I can brag about. But my best perigee Moon picture was taken earlier in the day, at 5.45 AM. I was up early preparing for a whole day workshop, and had been looking at the setting moon from my kitchen window, until it reached the mountain range of Sintra. It was then that I took my own perigee Moon photo, some 12 hours before anybody else in my country, I guess.

The picture was taken at 1/80 f/5.6 , ISO 100, with the camera and lens supported on my windowsill.