Waning Moon and Trees Over Merced River Canyon

 There was a period of my life that I did not sleep very well and would wake up frequently without provocation. On one such early morning in March of 2009, I arose at 3:45 am and decided to look out my front door to see whether it was cloudy, or whether I could see stars. I slid open the patio door and witnessed stars and a half moon floating lazily along the rim of the Merced River Canyon which rose three to four thousand feet above me. The timing of my sleeplessness was serendipitous as the scene was utterly fascinating! The moon hung right at the edge of the canyon rim and moved westerly all the while hovering right above or at the tree line.

After watching this elegantly floating moon in deft rapture for about a minute, I grabbed my tripod, camera, and 500mm f4 telephoto lens and walked about fifteen feet outside of my apartment and set everything up.

From my perspective, the moon seemed, for the most part, to be moving laterally following the tree lined rim at the top of the canyon. Pine trees went starkly silhouette against the very bright half-moon and the scenes unfolding through the viewfinder were incredible. I could see the dead snag tree in the photo even before the moon fully illuminated it. I had a sense that something extraordinary might be possible even before all the elements lined up in the viewfinder of my camera.

This type of photograph is very hard to execute because of the extreme magnification of the telephoto lens. Every tiny little vibration is bound to result in a blurry photographic representation of the scene, but even more so because of the sharply defined lines of the dead snag tree and the fine details of the craters on the moons surface.

My Nikon D200 camera has a DX sensor, meaning that there is a 1.5 crop factor, which essentially renders my 500mm f/4 lens into a 750mm f/4 lens. I added my TC-301 teleconverter to the setup, which effectively gave me 1500mm f/8 lens. This combination of lens and teleconverter is at the rather extreme end of magnification range for landscape photography and very hard to control in terms of vibration and sharpness in the final image. I used a separate specialized brace that attaches from the camera body to a tripod leg thereby reducing the traveling vibration of the shutter movement thought the lens barrel. Using a cable release and the mirror lockup function also reduced vibration to the absolute minimum to ensure that the photo could be as sharp and pronounced as was technically possible.

Nikon D200 camera at 200 ISO

Nikon 500mm f/4 P manual focus lens with TC-301 Teleconverter