7

CHAPTER
NIGHT AND LOW-LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY / The Nighttime Sky

to recompose or move to a different location,

which means wasting time and wasting the morn-

ing light. This doesn’t happen with the sunset

shoots, as you can see the area in front of the

camera clearly, and instead of things becoming

more visible, they become less visible, like the

graffiti on the rocks in Figure 7-5.

Shoot the Moon

The moon makes a great photography subject. It

really isn’t very difficult to photograph if you

keep in mind that it is very far away, is very

bright compared to the sky around it, and moves

all the time. The moon is not a direct light source,

but is actually the light of the sun reflected back.

Of course, with the distance involved, the moon

is a lot dimmer than the sun — about 18 stops of

light dimmer during the full moon compared to

the noon day sun — which means that to use the

moon as a light source, you would need to change

the setting by 18 stops compared to the sun dur-

ing the full moon.

navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/

data-services/rs-one-day-world and enter the

specific longitude and latitude.

■   Sunrise. This app, created by Adair Systems

for the iPhone, costs $0.99 and can calculate
the sunrise, solar noon, and sunset times, as
well as the phases of the moon. It shows the
current day by default, but can be used to cal-
culate the data for any day in the future (or
the past). The app uses your current location
by default, but can be set for a wide variety of
locations around the world.

■   LunaSolCal. This app for the Android smart

phone operating system gives you the sunrise
and sunset information, along with the moon-
rise and moonset times, for any date between
January 1, 1901, and December 31, 2099. It uses
the current location or allows you to pick from a
list of 30,000 cities from over 200 countries.

Once you know exactly what time the sun rises or
sets, you can plan your shoot accordingly. I usu-
ally plan to be in position and ready to shoot at
least an hour before the sun rises or sets. This
allows me to work out the exact composition of
the shot and make sure that the tripod is set up,
the camera is set in the tripod, I have the lens I
want to use attached, and, if it is a zoom lens, I
have it set to the focal length I want.

When planning a sunrise shoot, it does help to go
to the location during the day and see where you
will be shooting from, as well as make sure that
you have a composition in mind before the actual
photograph. For example, you may be shooting a
brand-new location, and you get there in plenty
of time to set up your camera on a tripod and start
to photograph first as the sky starts to lighten and
then as the first rays of sunlight illuminate the
scene. As the scene becomes lighter, however,
you see that there is a trash can in the middle of
the scene that you never noticed before because
everything was dark. That’s when you either have

More on using the moon as a light

source can be found in Chapter 10.

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Picking the right focal length

The moon is approximately 238,857 miles away.

That is a very long distance, and when you start

to aim your camera skyward, you see that the

moon will take up a very small part of the frame

unless you have a very long lens. For example, at

80mm, the moon will be a tiny white spec in a

sea of black. Even at 100mm, it is still going to be

too tiny to see any detail at all. When you get to

400mm, as in Figure 7-6, it starts to appear big

enough to see some detail. At 600mm, shown in

Figure 7-7, you can see some real detail. Unless