Strawberry Archives - Light and Landscapes

This year’s Strawberry Supermoon (June 24, 2021) featured a fantastic alignment which rose over the Thomas Jefferson Memorial when viewed from the foot of the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial.

The timing was also near perfect, as the moon rose during the later part of civil twilight and appeared as a large colorful moon against a pleasing dark blue sky. I used the The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) app to preplan this adventure, and the location and timing information can be seen in the screenshot from my iphone below. For this session, the augmented reality function didn’t have the location of the moon rising in exactly the right spot, but the map view of the moonrise worked perfectly.

Capturing a moonrise scene correctly requires taking at least two images, one image exposed for the foreground scene, and a second image that is exposed correctly for the moon. The two images can be stacked and merged later in processing to recreate the scene that our eyes can see, but modern cameras are still not able to capture this dynamic range of light in a single shot. I find the “lighten” blend mode in Photoshop particularly helpful for processing this type of scene. The warm lighting used to illuminate the interior of the Memorial created a nice color connection between the portico and the beautiful yellow moon.

This particular evening was very breezy, and there was a slight chop on the tidal basin. As a result, there was no reflection of the monument on the water. As the moon continued to rise and worked its way over the top of the Memorial, however, a spectacular display of moonshine appeared on the water that draws your eye across the tidal basin and up to the Memorial and the supermoon.

I noticed the light pollution from the surrounding D.C. skyline added a slight magenta undertone to the sky. I liked the effect, as it adds a bit of extra color to the scene and creates a bit of visual separation between the water and the sky.