How I Captured Total Eclipse of The Blood Moon
Here’s how a photographer captured the total eclipse of the Blood Moon.
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Location : Superstition Mountain Museum, Apache Junction, Arizona, USA
Date: Sept 27th 2015 - Lunar Eclipse window: 5:11pm - 9:27 pm
This was an epic eclipse : Total Eclipse of the Blood Moon ( as October’s Full moon is known). The Superstition Mountain Museum has a white church that has the Superstition Mountain as a beautiful backdrop. I had visualised shooting an eclipse over it for a long time - just an interesting juxtaposition of a church in front of “Superstition Mountains” with an eclipse - it got better this October with it being a total eclipse of the October Blood Moon!
This area is my backyard – hike here quite often in the cooler months – so I knew exactly where I wanted to be.
I had studied the moonrise and its transit through the sky using The Photographer’s Ephemeris – a great tool to research andplan outdoor photography in natural light, especially landscape and urban scenes. It is a map-centric sun and moon calculator to see how the light will fall on the land, day or night, for any location on earth.
I wanted to have an more up-close image with the Church and Mountains behind so I chose to be close to my subject to get the elements in a more realistic relative scale rather than the more classic far away shot with a zoom lens to magnify the moon. This was just one of the trade-offs. The other effect of being close to my foreground subject meant the moonrise over the Superstition Mountain Ridgeline will be almost 1 hr after the moon rise and almost 2 hrs after the start of the eclipse. This meant I would have my sequence start just as the moon was going into full eclipse - another trade-off!
Another key element to comprehend was the transit path of the moon - I wanted to accommodate the full transit through the end of eclipse. Given my intended composition, it made me adjust my composition a number of times to accommodate the series to capture the full transit.
The image is a composite of a series of vertical shots of the moon in eclipse and a foreground image of the church & mountains. Images were shot on a Canon 5D Mark III with 2 different setup.
Fore ground Image: f8, 3,2 sec, ISO 400 with Canon 28-70 lens at 46mm
Moon Rise Series of images ( All verticals) : Canon 5D Mark III with Canon 70-200mm lens, f5, 4-6 seconds, ISO 400-800 with lens at 135 mm.
My final few frames of the moon at almost full brightness were f5, 1/250sec to 1/1000sec, ISO 400.
Final composite image was rendered using Adobe Photoshop to stack the images using the lighten blending mode.
Overall, it was a good shoot, some planning and technical issues still need to be worked out but I was out there watching the eclipse and having fun at the impromptu photo party that had gathered at the church by the Superstition Mountains!