Rodney Campbell's Blog

The moon was full on Sunday evening and because this month’s full moon coincides with the moon’s perigee — its closest approach to Earth — it was also the year’s biggest.

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

Some friends and I headed down to Dawes Point under the southern end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge because The Photographers Ephemeris indicated that the moon would rise directly behind the Sydney Opera House and as luck would have it also approximately at the same time as sunset and twilight (moonrise at 5:06PM and sunset at 5:09PM behind us):

+ @ sec at

Sunset and early twilight was very pretty with soft pastel colours in the sky

Lavender Sails

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-200.0 mm f/2.8 @ 170 mm, 1/30 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Unfortunately we’d setup too far to the right and the moon was already above the horizon behind the Opera House before we moved over to the left just in front of the main bridge pilon. From here we could watch as the moon rose whilst there was still a little light and a touch of colour left in the sky

Pac Moon

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 280 mm, 1/15 sec at f/8, ISO 100

Actually truth be told it didn’t seem all that much bigger than normal but having it lined up with the Sydney Opera House with a nice clear sky behind it was pretty good.

As the moon rose and twilight headed towards full night and it became progressively much darker we moved back up the hill a little towards our original setup location

Blue

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 300 mm, 1/60 sec at f/8, ISO 200

By now I was bracketing exposures (at +-2 stops with a base exposure of at least -4EV to cope with the very bright moon). The -6EV exposure results in an almost black sky and opera house but with a nicely exposed moon and the -2EV exposure results in some colour in the sky and detail on the SOH but a nuclear moon. For the following I took the three exposures into photoshop and blended the moon from the better layers into the layer for the environment

Luna Opera

NIKON D7000 + 70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 185 mm, 1/3 sec at f/8, ISO 200

Eventually we moved back to where we’d started with the moon directly above the sails (and a little behind) but the sky was so dark by this stage that nothing I took at this time with the sails was really salvageable.

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