Western Railroad Discussion > Full Moon means Low Light

I have it on good authority that my good friend Low Light Don currently has his hands full working through a frustrating and time-consuming iPod/music library snafu. So I won’t mention how he can’t possibly touch my latest low-light volley seen below. Instead of mentioning how he can’t possibly touch my latest low-light volley, I’ll just describe how I got the shot.

Shooting a full moon can often be a tricky proposition. Common wisdom tells us we’re shooting a fully sunlit subject, so any regular handheld daylight exposure setting will suffice. Which is fine, unless you’re also trying to capture surrounding land-based subjects in twilight times. In my experience I go ahead and let my laziness rule the shot. I forego using a tripod and “bracket” a few shots at different shutter speeds & ISO settings. If a moving train is involved I’ll push the ISO up enough to use an action-stopping shutter speed, expose for the train & surroundings and hope I can use photo-editing technology to darken down crater detail on the moon’s surface.

That’s what I did in the image below. No train, but that’s OK. I had Abilene’s iconic Hotel Sunflower lurking back there, rising up out of the trees. And I also had those few right-of-way signs still catching rays from the setting sun. By this time of the evening a train would have been reduced to the bright glare of a headlight or a receding FRED, anyway. Here’s what the EXIF in my camera shows: 250mm, 1/200th - f5.6 @ 200 ISO.

1. UP (KP) main line looking east over the BNSF (ex-Santa Fe) crossing from S Washington St crossing in Abilene, KS. It’s 5:47 PM on February 8, 2020.

Thanks for looking!
Lance Garrels
santafe199

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Great shot. I would have bumped up the ISO to maybe 400 and turned on image stabilization, too!