I wish you all the best in this New Year with this image of the Supermoon I made on January 1st, and a little story about making the image.

I wanted to capture the moonrise from nearby Irazú volcano and I used the Photographer’s Ephemeris 3d app to look for the most promising spot for the photo. The app indicated that the Moon would appear above the horizon at 5:17 PM so I packed my gear and started at mid afternoon the drive up the mountain.

I am glad I left home at three o’clock because it was the rush hour on the way up: hundreds of vehicles with people returning from the summit or simply wanting to enjoy a nice sunset on this holiday. Luckily, all of them stayed on the western slope and I could see the moon rise all by myself.

I found a good spot and framed the view. The application even simulates the field of view using different focal lengths and I knew I had to set my lens at about 100 mm for my previsualized composition.

 

 

 

As the sun went down, temperature dropped quickly into the 40’s which is very cold for us in the tropics but, as you can imagine, my only concern was making the most of the 10 or 15 minutes of good light I had available: Sunsets are very brief near the equator and we don’t even get a full golden hour… maybe half?

As you can see, I was lucky and by 5:40 I was on my way home to edit my photos.

I made as many compositions as possible. You can see more clicking in this link to my Photoshelter Website.

Happy New Year!