How to get "Harvest Moon" shots...

[pulse64]

Originally Posted by IainM

If you have a really big zoom lens, and the moon is close to the horizon, and you are far enough away from the subject you want to place with the moon, then you can get that kind of shot.

It's one of the more fun uses of large zooms.

It does compress perspective but that's not always a bad thing.

This is a link to a youtube video, it's from a BBC series interviewing master photographers. This particular one is with Andreas Feininger, and he has some interesting things to say about using zoom lenses to show scale and size.
YouTube - Andreas Feininger Part1


The shot above has NASA in the corner, so I assume it's from them. I doubt that they would photoshop a shot like that. Especially when I'm quite sure they have the equipment to do that kind of shot.

Thanks for this really helpful!

[daniel9ds]

I am a newbie here and just wanna say Hi to everyone. I am Daniel from Pennsylvania, US.


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[drr0b]

The key is to get far enough away from your subject, so that it is the same size as the moon. The moon has a fixed size in the sky, about half a degree; this is about the same size as your thumb held at arm's length. Then you need a long lens to make the composition a decent size.

A bit of mathematics is helpful to find out how far away you need to be; the angular size of an object is given by its actual size divided by the distance (if the angle is in radians). To convert from degrees to radians, you multiply by pi /180; since pi = 3.141..., you can just divide by 60.

So, if you want something to be the same angular size as the moon, you can divide the actual size by the angle (0.00875 in this case, since the angle is 0.5 degrees). 1/0.0875 is 115, so if you multiply the actual size by about 100, that is the approximate distance you need.

I guess those cacti could be about 10 feet tall, meaning that the photographer was about 1000 feet away.

A 300 mm lens on a 1.6 crop camera has a view of 4 degrees; this would be enough to get a nice image for a computer screen, but you'd need a much bigger lens, or some fancy enlarging technique, to make a print

[drr0b]

Here's an example of a moon shot over Boston, from Astronomy Picture of the Day


Note that the photographer is 10 *miles* from Boston at this point, so the buildings are actually smaller than the moon