On April 25th, the Pink Moon was due to rise and I made plans to try to capture it. I use a program called TPE (the photographer’s ephemeris) to plan out the location of moon rise, moon set, sunrise and sunsets. I opened up that program on my iPad and started hunting for good vantage points. I decided that Crocker Park would be the best location for the April full moon and headed there before sunset. After the sun disappeared below the horizon, I started to wonder when the moon would make its appearance. There were some clouds/haze at the horizon but, after 40 minutes of waiting, I was getting ready to give up.
That’s when I turned my head to the right and saw the moon come up over Marblehead Neck. I must have misread the lines on the program and had been staring at where the sun had risen that morning (over the lighthouse). I quickly adjusted and zoomed out to capture the moon rising over the Neck with the few boats in the harbor serving as a nice foreground element. I still had to contend with the clouds and it wasn’t until the moon reached just below this point that its light finally shown.
At this point, the rest of the scene was too dark so I had to decide whether to expose for the moon and let everything else go to black or the surroundings and blow out the moon. As you can see, I went for the latter. There was a third option of compositing two or more shots to fit a well exposed moon into that orb of light but the results would have looked fake and I actually prefer the bright light of the moon looking a bit like a false sun. Hope you agree…