How to Photograph the Full Moon: 4 Tips for Epic Shots

Hello my excellent friends. If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know that the full moon is one of my favorite things in the world to photograph and I go on missions almost every month to shoot it. But I didn’t start out taking killer moon photos, I started like everybody else. I’d put my camera on a tripod and use a longer exposure and a high ISO and I ended up with photos that looked, frankly, like crap. So trust me when I say: I understand your frustrations.

My big breakthrough moment that allowed me to take photos of the moon that I was happy with was realizing, as beautiful as the full moon is to our naked eye, it is incredibly difficult to photograph because of four main things. One, it’s not very interesting by itself. Two, it’s much brighter than you realize and it screws up your exposure. Three, it’s tiny–I know it looks huge, but it’s not. It’s tiny. And four, it moves around like a drunken sailor. Overcome those four challenges and you’re going to have awesome moon photos!

So in this video (and article), I’m going to give you four quick tips to address each of those particular points.

One. Like I said, the moon is not really that compelling by itself, floating in the inky blackness. Even if you’re able to get a decent shot of the moon like this, it’s kind of dry and academic and isolated from the viewer. A full moon one month kind of looks like a full moon the next month, and like the full moon the next month, and on and on and on. So unless you’re doing moon detail shots like Andrew McCarthy, you are way better off shooting the moon when it’s near the horizon, aligning it with some cool stuff here on planet Earth.

In my opinion, the best subject to photograph the moon next to is basically anything a long ways away from you that sticks up into the sky by itself–things like mountains, lighthouses, or even people if they’re far enough away. This is because the farther your subject is from you the bigger the moon is going to appear compared to that subject. That’s how you make the moon as big as a person, or even as big as a mountain. And the reason it’s important for your subject to stick up into the sky by itself is so that you can actually align it with the moon.

Two. The moon is crazy bright. It’s brighter than the earth at night time or even during blue hour. If you try to shoot it at night or during blue hour, you either end up with photos where you lose all detail in the landscape or you’ve got a blown out blob where the moon is supposed to be. To overcome this challenge we simply need to shoot the moon when there’s light on the landscape as well, because the overall dynamic range of the scene goes from something extreme to something way more manageable. This means that you can get a single exposure that captures both the detail of the moon as well as the landscape at the same time.

Now, can you bracket exposures and combine them later in post? Of course you can. Personally, I like to do it in one shot. It’s just part of the fun challenge. My best advice: look up the sun and moon rise/set times and just look for when they line up the best, and then go out.

Three. The moon always looks really huge when it’s coming up over the horizon, right? But as you probably know, it’s just an optical illusion. For this challenge I have a really, really simple tip for you: use a long telephoto lens when you’re shooting. Anything between 200-1000 millimeters will work, but in my experience, the sweet spot is about 400 to 750 millimeters. This range helps the moon appear very large within your frame, but it also shows a lot of what makes your subject or landscape interesting. It may be tempting to get a 600mm lens and then put a 2X teleconverter on there, but what ends up happening is that you blow up your landscape so much that there’s no longer any context of what it is. That completely kills the connection for the viewer as well as the photo’s impact.

Four. The last challenge that we need to overcome is that the moon is squirrley and moves a lot. It does not set in a straight line up or down, but at an angle, and it wanders all over the sky. And to make matters more difficult, the full moon only sets at the same angle twice per year, roughly, which means your desired alignment might not work out again if you end up having to go back to reshoot a scene during the next full moon. The other thing is that the moon moves surprisingly fast. So if you’re not prepared or you’re not paying attention, the moon is going to go from being perfectly in line with your subject to being completely behind it within minutes. And then it’s going to vanish before you realize it.

To solve the challenge of this wiggly moon you need to be able to predict where the moon is going to be at any given moment. For that all you need to do is use some kind of planning app. My app of choice is PhotoPills. It’s true, there are a lot of tools and features in this app, but I’m going to simplify it for you as best I can. All you have to do to get started is learn how to use the augmented reality tool, which I elaborate on and demonstrate in the video above.

And with that, get out there and shoot that moon!