Chasing the Moon has become a tradition, pastime, passion, and obsession at BlueSteele. It starts with an app on the phone called “Photographer’s Ephemera” available on the AppStore. Using the app, find the date in the month when the sunset and moonrise times closely coincide. In this month’s case, 7:09 pm moonrise and 6:58 pm sunset. The goal is to have some ambient light hanging around from the sunset to help light the earth’s foreground. In my opinion, a moon shot depends on establishing a relationship to where the image was created. The foreground is a supporting character in the event in a contextual way.

Also on the app is a satellite view of the earth with directional lines that help establish where the sun will set/rise and where the moon will rise/set. Very useful because at least you get a hint as to where to position yourself for the exposures. All this planning pays off big-time when you get into the field and set up for the shot.

For this image, we arrived about a half-hour before lift-off and waited patiently in the car, avoiding the Colordao evening wind. As chance will have it, sometimes nature cooperates and provides a little distraction. Along came the Prairie Chicken to entertain us as the sun began to set. A single bird that walked like a chicken, strutting and bopping along. I managed to get off one or two shots in the fading light.

With that momentary distraction out of the way, the business at hand became more urgent. I positioned myself behind a pine tree to get some wind-block. With the camera on the tripod aimed at the general direction of the future moonrise, I set my ISO to 1250 and aperture to f/6.3 hoping to get a reasonable shutter speed to minimize the impact of the wind on my equipment and the scene. I set the Canon 5D Mark III to a 2-stop HDR mode that would capture three images in succession, two stops apart. Again, hedging my bets as there is no time to be fiddling with camera settings when in the middle of a moon shot. My previous experiences with moon shots have led me in this direction.

The moon rose, images were captured and the excitement ended quickly. Back to BlueSteele to process these RAW images and select the one to use.