Hi Tracy,
One of my earliest fascinations in photography was with the moon on the water. I even won a silver medal in the PSNZ annual saloon for a landscape image called “Moonlight on Rocks” back in the days when I was younger, sillier and felt compelled to give every photograph a title. I found the medal in an old box of books when I was back in Christchurch the other week which is why I remembered it!
Anyway, after a fair amount of experimentation I have learned that the best time for photographing the moon in a landscape is usually on or just prior to the full moon.
Here is the reason why. Most people significantly underestimate how dark a moonlit landscape is by comparison to a sunny day. Most of my students usually guess that the difference is somewhere between 10 percent and 1 percent of the light. The fact is on a moonlit night the landscape is getting about 0.0005 percent of the light that it would otherwise get on a sunny day!
Now here is the important thing to remember… even though the landscape is really dark, the fact is that the moon is still being lit directly by the sun! There is no way you are ever going to get the moon and the landscape looking good together.
This is why I think the best time to photograph moonrises is not when the sky is dark but actually while there is still some daylight left in the sky.
The full moon is the only time that you get to see the moon rising at sunset (one has to be in the opposite side of the sky for it to be full) and so the simplest way to determine a good time is to have a look at the moonrise time and the sunset times in the paper or online. Ideally you want the moon to be rising at about the same time the sun is setting.
If you miss this particular day, don’t forget over the next couple of days you can also capture the moon setting on sunrise.
With this in mind, this
photo probably would have been better if it had been made a day or two earlier.
There will be other super moons but in the interim, I would suggest that over
the coming months you have a look at the moonrise/sunset times and start planning.
Cheers,
Anthony