COVID has already taken so much from us, but one thing we won’t allow it to steal is Halloween, regardless of how low-key it’s going to be. Also, it seems that during this year’s Halloween, photographers have a reason to celebrate. Why you may ask? Because for the first time since 1944, they’ll have the perfect backdrop to put their skills to the test to create some wonderfully eerie shots thanks to the Blue Moon (which I think adds a peculiar touch to the spookiest night of the year).
Perfectly timed for the day, this Blue Moon will illuminate the sky on Saturday 31st October, reaching every corner of the earth and all time-zones (did I mention for the first time since 1944?). If you’re a camera nerd, I bet you’d want to capture the perfect shot. And to help you out with this, nature photographer Andrew Fusek Peters, whose work regularly appears in newspapers and magazines, stepped into The Beautiful Lifestyle Online to share with us some tips for anyone who will be on the hunt for a creative challenge.
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Tips on How to Capture the Perfect Blue Moon this Halloween
1. Right place, right time
The first step is to know where and when the moon is going to rise. In the past, that involved a lot of tedious calculations, but these days software can do the work for you. I use The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, a light visualisation tool for outdoor and landscape photographers. This allows you to plan, within a 50-metre line so you don’t have to go too far from home, where you want to be, and see when the moon will rise and what it will hide behind.
2. Picture the narrative
I prefer to photograph the Blue Moon as part of a wider scene to tell a story. I’m always looking for an interesting foreground – to put the moon within a landscape or a built environment. This can be more of a creative challenge than the close-ups of the moon we often see on social media. My top tip would be to shoot in RAW to ensure you still get the moon and the foreground in all its glory.
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3. Trust your creative instincts
The moon is like a species, like wildlife. It’s extremely shy, so when it comes to the actual shoot you have to think on your feet. My 2016 picture of the supermoon which made the front-page of UK’s national newspaper ‘The Times’ very nearly didn’t happen. I’d abandoned my shoot and was heading home. Then suddenly, driving towards Church Stretton in Shropshire, I saw the clouds clear. The moon was almost directly behind what I now know is a volcanic structure called Three Fingers Rock. I thought: ‘Oh my gosh’. With my Canon EOS 7D Mark II, a Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM lens plus a Canon Extender 2x III giving me 1600mm I knew I had as much reach as I could humanly get. I used a hedge as a tripod and fired off three shots in a row. And because I knew my focus point – rather than stick the moon in the centre of the picture, I wanted to have a leading line – the first shot was the one.
4. It’s all in the hands
Avoid using a tripod. You need to be able to respond very quickly and move your position so you can place the moon exactly where you want it in the frame – just like with the distant sunset over hills. You do not have a lot of time, because the light that you want is the last light of the day: dusk light. So, to get your shot, you just have to go handheld. If you’re using a big telephoto lens and extender and have to respond fast, I’d recommend sitting down and using your knee as an improv tripod. When it comes to your settings, you want to expose for the moon, which means you can keep your shutter speed and ISO fairly low. In general, the higher the ISO, the more difficulty you will have in recovering shadow detail. If you’re shooting the foreground as a silhouette, then you don’t have to worry about this as much.
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5. Use the right kit
When you expose for the Blue Moon, the amount of landscape detail you can capture will depend on the quality of your camera. With my Canon EOS 7D Mark II, I know I’m not going to have any issues with focus, and if I’ve got some light on the landscape, it allows me to recover a massive amount of detail in the shadows. When it comes to lenses, go big. If you want a big moon in your pictures you want big lenses.
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6. Trust the process
Once you’ve got your RAW image, the Blue Moon will still look quite blown out. Pay attention to highlights, whites and shadows, as well as radial filters to bring out detail. When it comes to your foreground, work with shadows and graduated filters. As Ansel Adams famously said: ‘The negative is the score and the print is the performance’, and the same thing applies in moon photography when it comes to your RAW and processed files.
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