Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Took the big lens out last night and shot the moon! It’s a film lens, not a digital one, so there’s a little chromatic aberration going on. But you gotta love a 2000mm lens. The red is real, the reason to try to photograph a lunar eclipse is the color and the darkness of the moon.

How to Photograph the Moon

You need a big lens, the bigger, the better. Except during a lunar eclipse, the moon is really bright. Mixing it with other elements like the skyline is difficult. You either take two pictures to expose the moon and the earth-bound objects separately or let the moon burn out, like I did with this picture of the full moon over Minneapolis. To get the exposure right for the moon, check out this chart I found or just wing it and look at the LCD. The moon isn’t going anywhere, so experimenting isn’t difficult. If your camera has a histogram, make sure you use it with night photography, it’s easy to underexpose the image since the LCD looks brighter to your dilated pupils at night.

Make sure you chose a clear night, in February in Minneapolis it gets pretty cold at night. Last night it was below zero and the nice thing about that is that it’s too cold for clouds to form, so it’s pretty clear (snow pants rock). Back to the list: big lens, a good tripod, cable release or camera on timer mode and flashlight (cell phone works as a light too, a pretty good one in fact). The moon is on the move, so keep the shutter time down. That’s not an issue with the moon normally, but it is with an eclipse. This one is at f8 (crappy lens) and 4 seconds. You can see the moon is blurred slightly in today’s picture because it moved noticeably in those 4 seconds.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

The successor to Saturday.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

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Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

The moon threaded the Minneapolis skyline Tuesday night. After I captured yesterday’s picture, I went down to the sculpture garden to catch this image. Here’s the problem: I need better mittens. I was so cold that by the time I got to this location, my hands were so cold that I didn’t want to get the tripod out and set up outside. So I put the Image Stabilized Nikon 70-300mm telephoto on the camera and hand-held the camera out the window. With the aperture wide open I still had to get the exposure time down to at least a tenth, so I cranked the ISO up. Thus the noisy image. I might be able to fix some of it in Photoshop, but one of my goals for Mitchster.com is to only work in Lightroom.

Shooting the full moon this month was inspired by something that happened at my alma mater, The Prairie School in Racine Wisconsin. Sophomores Connor Leipold, Tim Pastika and Kyle Simpson discovered an asteroid. You can read about it here: Prairie students discover an asteroid. They were using technology provided from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., which is also the alma mater of the science teacher, Andrew Vanden Heuvel. I saw a PBS special about students using remote telescopes. Check it out, according to the website, students can use these remote telescopes for free. If you know anyone who has done this, let me know.

That PBS show also talked about “street astronomy” — groups of astronomers build inexpensive large telescopes and take them to the streets. They invite passers-by to look at the heavens. Pretty cool. Does anyone do this? Please comment! As a photographer, that much glass makes me, well, excited.

A little something fun for you: Moon Phase Gadget - Not my picture, this image updates to show the current moon phase. Cool, huh?

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Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

I found a new perspective on the emerald city of the Northern Plains. You have to bike a lot or work for BNSF to know this location. This was one of my more planned out shoots; I tracked the moon for the last few days knowing that last night was a full moon. I searched this area for an angle that would get the moonrise in the frame with the city. I changed locations several times last night and will be showing them over the coming days. This was my first spot, chosen because it was the highest.

A lot of night scenes with the moon are photoshopped together. I wanted to make sure that this one was obviously natural. It was tricky to get the exposure right, because the moon is so darn bright. Had I exposed the moon correctly, the city would have been severely underexposed. So I chose to blow out the moon and enjoy the illuminated haze around it. One of the cool features of a sub-zero atmosphere is ice crystals. That’s what is going on with the moon, it’s not schmutz on the lens causing the halo, it was clearly a real-life effect. The glowing ice-haze ties the moon to the buildings; both compositionally and technically.

On the techy side, I set the exposure at 2.5 seconds and then moved the aperture up and down. I wanted to blur the traffic, yet keep the exposure times to a minimum so I could keep the moon sharp — the darn thing moves faster than you think!

This baby is the successor to the Thanksgiving Rush Hour I35 photo, which one do you like better? Let me know.

I need new mittens.

It’s the biggest full moon of the year (seriously, it’s 14% wider and 30% brighter). Make sure you get out and see the “Hunter’s Moon” come up! I managed to get up early this morning and catch it before it went down. No better way to start your day than fumbling with a telephoto lens in the dark on a 38° morning without mittens (true Minnesotans don’t wear them ’til it’s at least 10°).

All lunatic blogger references aside, I was out last night and was amazed at how bright the moon was, so I looked it up and found out why. This morning’s picture isn’t the best moon shot I’ve taken, I was using my 70-210 Nikkor that I’m starting to not trust. It’s doing some weird stuff that looks like chromatic aberration, but the guy at National Camera said it was a good lens… I guess I’m going to have to spend more, oh well. I might set up the spotting scope tonight and mount the camera on it and try again. Now that the sun is coming up and I’m enjoying my dark roast at Caribou, sanity is sweeping lunacy from my mind and the fruits of clarity suggest otherwise — everyone knows what the moon looks like. We’ll go look for some more colorful things to shoot today and get back on track with daylight, after all, there’s less and less of it everyday.