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The Green Goblins and the Blue Sharks face off beneath a full moon Monday evening in Hartselle during the U8 AYSO end of season soccer tournament. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 11/02/09

Ansel Adams is one of my photographic heroes.  There are so many of his photos that I absolutely love that I am hard pressed to chose just one.  I suppose if you backed me into a corner and made me choose I would select the photo of the moonrise over a small adobe church and cemetery in Hernandez, New Mexico.  The photo was taken in 1941.  The story of the photograph is almost as remarkable as the photograph itself.

The image was shot in Adams’ trademark black and white using an 8×10 view camera.  The real trick is that he could not find his exposure meter at the critical moment.  If you know much of Adams’ story you will realize that this was a minor obstacle for him.  The account he gives in the book, “Examples, the making of 40 photographs,” is amazing.  Here is a short quote from the book.

“I was at a loss with the subject luminance values, and I confess I was thinking of bracketing several exposures, when I suddenly realized I knew the luminance of the moon – 250c/ft2.  Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII, 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor of 3x was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.”

A pumpkin moon rises over the bank of the Tennessee River at Decatur, Alabama. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr.

Yeah, he lost me too.  The photograph, however, is exquisite.  I love to shoot the moon but I have never even come close to anything as nice as this and I have the best light meters and equipment.  It doesn’t keep me from trying though.  I am showing you several photos of the moon which, by the way, is much, much brighter than you think it is.  There is just about one day a year when the sun and moon come into the proper alignment to get the low moon on the horizon with enough light left from the sun to give some detail on the ground.  It usually comes around late October or early November and you get literally one shot at it.

This year I actually made a nice image – the kids playing soccer – because of a fortunate set of circumstances.  My son Peter had a soccer game which I wanted to see being the last one I would have a chance to see this year so I left work early.  On the way down I suddenly realized that if everything came together I might get a shot of the full moon rising over the field.  It was a perfectly clear evening.  When I arrived the moon was just peeping over the tree line which meant I had to really hurry.  I ran down to my son’s game only to realize the moon was not visible from his field.  I ran over to the field next to his and found a low spot to stand in.  This raised the level of the kids relative to the moon so it closed the visual distance between the two.

I don’t remember the exposure exactly but it was something like ISO 1250 with an f13 aperture.  The shutter speed was barely legal for action with a long lens at about 1/125th second.  Those are approximates.  I simply could not hold depth of field to make the moon sharp and the kids sharp so I settled for a nearly focused moon that was nearly exposed properly.  It is a bit over and the kids are a bit under.  It takes a bit of creative Photoshop work to make the image presentable.

Wispy clouds painted orange by the setting sun partially obscures the moon at the end of a stormy day in Decatur. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr.

The other shots were done with the combination of a 400mm f3.5 lens on a Nikon D2H body.   I have no idea what the exposure was on either.  The vertical shot is of the moon rising over the Tennessee River.  The horizontal is one I saw and grabbed on the fly because the beautiful clouds were lit by the setting sun which was already below the horizon.  I just had a few frames with that wonderful color.

Should you try some moon shots just remember if you want detail in the moon surface you will probably have to sacrifice detail in your foreground elements except on those rare occasions when the old thrush is sitting on the doorstep cracking snails with its beak when the sun goes down and the moon is just rising.  (For those who don’t know, that was a little reference from J.R.R. Tolkein’s classic The Hobbit.  Come on people, get some culture.)

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.