Super Flower Blood Moon
The Super Flower what!?
The Super Flower Blood Moon. There’s always a lot of hype for this sort of thing. Really, it was just a total lunar eclipse. The Canadian Space Agency says that 37.3% of lunar eclipses are blood moons, and we average two lunar eclipses per year. In fact, we have two in 2022 with the next one being mid-November. This isn’t a super rare event, but it is a super cool event and worth watching if you get the chance. As the moon passes into the shadow of the Earth, direct sunlight is blocked from reaching the moon, but indirect light bouncing off the Earth still illuminates the moon. The Earth scatters a lot of the light with a blue wavelength which is why the blood moon has that reddish colour.
Making The Photo
I showed up early and walked around the monastery ruins looking for my favourite angle on the scene. I came up with a couple compositions, but ultimately decided on a more frontal view.
I went back into my car to wait for the sun to set, it was a little chilly in the wind. I don’t normally choose to do an astro shoot so close to the city, and I didn’t expect the area to be so busy. There was a visit by private security and police checking out the area, and I was never alone at any point of the evening.
Normally this sort of thing would bother me, but because I was shooting the full moon, light pollution is less of an issue. There were a lot of street lights, headlights and flashlights to contend with.
Once I was content with the shooting I had done on the moon, I wanted to make sure I had a shot for the foreground and the sky. Since I was so zoomed in on the moon with 600mm focal length, I didn’t capture much of the star field behind. I slipped on my 24mm lens and just took a quick shot of the sky so I could have a more natural sky. The exposure was dark since I was so close to the city and the light pollution could very easily ruin the image.
For my foreground, I noticed that there was a bright orange streetlight in the parking lot illuminating the monastery. I knew that it would be really difficult to get rid of that orange colour cast in post, so I opted to use my blue hour photo before the street light and flashlights were on.
A Word on Perspective
I’ve now got three components going into this photo. I’m not too fussed about making a composite image like this. Realistically, this allows me to make a more accurate representation of what I observed.
Wide angle lenses tend to make objects closer to the camera appear larger and objects further away look smaller. The moon, very far away, ends up being a minor element in the scene. In my opinion, this defeats the whole purpose of making a blood moon photograph. It has to be more prominent. I shot the moon with a telephoto lens so that I could resolve more detail.
I’m not looking to exaggerate the truth though. While I was in the field, I took note that the size of the moon from my perspective was about half the width of the front window on the ruins. This also gave me a very easy reference point for sizing the moon in my final image.