Moon Photos: Lunar Photography Tutorials & Examples

Mar 5, 2009

Awe Inspiring Moon Photos

Categories: Cool Photos, Featured

Written By: lightstalking

A full moon sends everyone a little crazy, but capturing good moon photos is an extremely difficult photography art to master. A well done photograph of the moon can add atmosphere to a photo like nothing else, but most shots of the moon tend to be bland and disappointing.

So we decided to go and see what we could find in terms of fantastic moon photography.

Once again, the good Creative Common folks from Flickr have produces some exceptional photos of what is really an over-done, but usually poorly-done subject. They certainly seem to buck the average trend with these awe inspiring moon photos.

As always, you can find some more information at the end of the post about photographing the moon and how it should be done to produce results like these.

We’re sure you will agree after seeing these photos that moon photography is a facet of this skill that you might like to learn someday!

Tutorials on Lunar Photography (Note – Some are on moons as part of a landscape and others are on moon photos exclusively):

Ilan Says:
March 6th, 2009 at 3:18 am

Most of these are just photo manipulations, and not really “Moon photo”

Jenny Says:
March 6th, 2009 at 6:34 pm

Maybe so, Ilan, but they are stunning nonetheless!

admin Says:
March 6th, 2009 at 6:41 pm

I have to agree with Jenny on this one. I mean, in photography if we discard “manipulations” , then we discard a huge portion of the most famous photos in history.

dcclark Says:
March 8th, 2009 at 4:29 pm

Not to mention that it’s virtually impossible to get a good “moon photo” without manipulation — if you can see the moon, you probably need a long shutter speed to see anything else — and then the moon will be blown out. There’s nothing wrong with photo manipulation!

admin Says:
March 8th, 2009 at 5:04 pm

I agree wholeheartedly with dcclark here. I have always found the backlash against photoshop to be completely misplaced. Photoshop really only does things that can also be done in a darkroom.

For example, everyone probably knows James Nachtwey’s famous photo of the child in the street in Chechnya (his face from eye level up with the bombed out street as the background). If you watch the documentary “War Photographer” you get a bit of an idea about how much darkroom “manipulation” that photo actually had. Yet, I don’t think many people would call “fake” on that photo.

Now maybe there are degrees of manipulation and in an editorial or journalistic context there are probably good points to be made, but in the realm of artistic photography, I really don’t see a huge issue.

Aggie Villanueva Says:
May 15th, 2009 at 4:08 pm

I totally agree. Just last week I went on a full moon shoot in Ghost Ranch, NM. As magical as it is in person, it doesn’t always translate well in lens. I had to use manipulation, but came out with some shots I believe will sell well. Most of us don’t care if it’s for real. In my photo art I stress that I use PS and post processing to allow others to see life as I see it, not as my camera sees it.

David Says:
August 24th, 2009 at 5:42 pm

I agree also that these are amazing “photos.” However, not only are most of these manipulated beyond anything remotely realistic, there are a couple that couldn’t even be shot and pasted into a picture without 3d graphics. While beautiful, the title of the blog is “moon photos.” It’s a little deceiving.

admin Says:
August 25th, 2009 at 2:53 am

Yeah, I don’t know how I sleep at night. ;)