Moon Chasing

Gary Hart Photography: Autumn Moonrise Reflection, Half Dome and the Merced River, Yosemite

Half Dome Autumn Moonrise Reflection, Merced River, Yosemite
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 G
1/8 second
F/14
ISO 100

Many years ago I stood with a couple of other photographers on Sentinel Bridge in Yosemite. It was a few minutes before sunset and we were waiting, cameras poised, for the moon to ascend from behind Half Dome. As we chatted, a young woman approached and asked no one in particular what we were all waiting for. When I told her about the imminent moonrise, she laughed and advised us that we were too late, that the moon had already risen because she’d just come from watching the moonrise at Tunnel View. After several unsuccessful attempts to explain to her why the moon would in fact be arriving soon, and how the moon rises at different times depending on the viewer’s location, elevation, and nearby terrain, we finally gave up and she went on her way none the wiser.

Earlier this month my Yosemite Autumn Moon photo workshop group got the opportunity to apply this moon chasing approach firsthand, photographing a (nearly) full moon rising above Half Dome at sunset on three consecutive nights, from three different locations.

The challenge to photographing three consecutive moonrises is that, while sunset at any given location from one night to the next happens at more or less the same time, the moon rises nearly an hour later each night—in other words, if you stay put, the landscape feature that the moon rose behind last night will tonight obscure the moon until long after dark.

So, while the Sun/Moon/Earth choreography is fixed and predictable to ridiculous precision, my location for viewing this show is completely my call. Moon rising too late at one location? Just find another location that’s farther back, or higher. Or both. Of course that’s often easier said than done, but Yosemite, with its elongated east/west orientation and elevated vistas, is ideally set up for moon photography. (Not to mention its variety of world class subjects.)

(As you may have noticed) my favorite moonrise subject in Yosemite is Half Dome. And why not? Half Dome’s prominent shape stands out beautifully against open sky (rather than getting lost against a darker or more distracting terrestrial background), is viewable from countless different vantage points, and is wonderfully recognizable to the general public. But, since the moonrise location changes significantly from one month to the next, its ideal Half Dome alignment doesn’t happen most months. If I’ve learned nothing else in twenty-plus years of chasing moonrises in Yosemite, I do know that the full moon and Half Dome only align during one or two months on either side of the winter solstice—the rest of the year the moon rises either too far south (most months), which puts it behind Yosemite Valley’s towering south wall, or (maybe once or twice) too far north, putting it behind El Capitan.

Before attempting to photograph a moonrise, it’s important to understand that a location’s published sunrise/set or moonrise/set times always assumes a flat horizon. So unless you’re atop a mountain or on a ship at sea, you’ll probably see the sun disappear behind the terrain in the west before sunset, and you’ll probably need to wait until after moonrise for the moon to ascend above the terrain in the east.

In general, my goal for photographing any full moonrise is to get the moon near the horizon during the window that spans 15 minutes before to 15 minutes after the “official” (flat horizon) sunset. Earlier than that, there’s not enough contrast for the moon to stand out against still too-bright sky; later, there’s too much dynamic range to capture detail in the dark landscape and daylight-bright moon. Since the location for viewing the moon in that that sweet spot changes from night to night, so does my location.

With the sun at my back when viewing a rising full moon, I’m not too concerned about the precise timing of the sun’s disappearance—I know that once direct sunlight is off the landscape, the sky will still be bright enough to illuminate the foreground for 20 or 30 minutes. But I need to be pretty dead-on with the location and timing of the moon’s arrival.

Knowing the moon will rise about 40-60 minutes later each day, it’s easy to infer that the greater the number of days until the full moon, the earlier the moon will rise and the higher it will be at sunset. (Regrettably) I have no control over the timing of the absolute (flat horizon) sunset/moonrise, but I can control the elevation of my own personal horizon, and therefore the moon’s appearance on any given evening, by simply choosing my position relative to the point on the horizon above which the moon will rise.

To make this Yosemite workshop’s consecutive moonrises work, for our first evening I targeted a favorite riverside spot beneath Half Dome, on the east side of Yosemite Valley. For our second sunset, my original plan was to be at another spot on the Merced River near he middle of the valley, but we ended up photographing that evening’s moonrise from Glacier Point because I feared a forecast storm threatened to thwart the Glacier Point shoot I’d planned for our fourth and final night. The workshop’s main moonrise event was the Tunnel View moonrise on our third sunset, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Only on that third evening was the moon the scene’s primary focal point—those first two evenings it was more of an accent to already beautiful scenes, but a wonderful accent it was.

Since this year’s autumn moon workshop started on the first day of standard time, the earlier than we’d all been accustomed to shorted our afternoon by an hour. That, combined with the fact that the spot I had in mind for that initial moonrise, while largely overlooked by tourists, is no secret to photographers. Wanting to get my group set-up before more people arrived, I passed on my usual workshop first shooting location and headed straight to my moonrise location.

Arriving an hour before sunset and finding it largely unoccupied, we had about 45 minutes to work before the moon appeared. The fall color and reflections were great, but clouds completely obscured the sky behind Half Dome to the point that it looked like the moon might be a no-show. But as we enjoyed the otherwise beautiful photography, the clouds parted just in time for the moon’s arrival.

I started with tighter telephoto shots, but quickly widened my composition as the moon separated from the ridge, trying both vertical and horizontal frames. Since I already have quite a few vertical moonrise images from here, I opted process this even wider horizontal frame and am extremely pleased with the way all the ingredients came together for an image I didn’t already have.

In defense of a small moon

Any time I share a wide angle image of the moon, I know I might hear from someone who tells me they’d prefer the image without the moon at all. And many years ago, when I proposed an article on photographing the moon to “Outdoor Photographer” magazine, the editor at the time (not the current OP editor) replied that moon photographs don’t work because the moon appears so much smaller in a photograph than people remember it.

They’re certainly entitled to their opinion, but I’ve never thought the moon needs to appear large to be an effective subject. I always look for ways to add something to an already beautiful scene that might make it stand out from the many other images of that scene, and the moon, with outsize emotional power that punches well above its weight, can dominate a disproportional segment of any frame.

And you don’t need to take my word for it. Ansel Adams certainly had this figured out long before I came on the scene, making a small moon the prime focal point of many compositions, including the image that’s arguably his most famous, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.”