Moonrise at Mt. Rainier
A composite photo showing the path of the moon rising behind Mt. Rainier
This is a photo that simultaneously completely speaks for itself, and is also completely opaque.
It speaks for itself in the sense of: that it’s chock full of cool visuals: multiple images of the moon rising, a crisp photograph of Mt. Rainier, and a distinctive foreground of rural Washington State.
But think for a moment about the actual problem that is solved here:
Find a place to set up a camera such that the camera, the mountain, and the 250,000-mile-distant moon all line up nicely.
And of course the weather has to cooperate.
The process of taking this photograph started a few months ago. I used a software program on my iPad, PhotoPils, which allows one to make plans for a photograph like this. You tell the software where you want to stand, and it shows you where the rising or setting sun or moon will be on a map.
Now, about ‘where to stand’. There are only a few areas that provide excellent views of Mt. Rainier; I know of a handful of them within a half-hour of where I live. How is it that at 14,000 foot tall mountain doesn’t have more useful viewpoints?
First, obstructions. Trees are everywhere in western Washington, and they are all big. And of course, houses. Shopping centers. Telephone poles, and the wires that run between them.
And all the local hills, the Cascade mountains, tend to block significant portions of the mountain.
Some days, it seems like everything in the area is between me and the mountain!
This particular spot, along Larson Loss Road in Buckley, is a nice one. Not as high up as the one I use in Graham, so the bottom portions of the volcano are not very visible, and a few tall trees slightly obstruct the view (or add visual interest to the composition; either attitude is acceptable for a photographer).
And that brings me to the the third category of photographic obstacles: the things between the camera and the mountain are going to be in the photograph. That eliminates 99% of the remain potential sites after allowing for trees, hills, and wires.
So Larson Loss is one of my handful of go-to locations for a photograph. From where I am on the planet, the available locations line up with the moon and the mountain only a few days before full moon. (Dream: find a place where things line up at full moon.)
And this brings us to the other hard reality of lining up mountains with celestial objects: those objects aren’t in perfect parallel orbits, and the earth is titled on its axis with respect to the plane of its orbit. So things are constantly moving. The night before this shot, from that location, the moon would have risen quite a bit further to the left. The next night, quite a bit further to the right.
And last month? The lineup wasn’t as good; the moon and the sun and the earth were aligned a bit differently a month ago, and the moon rose completely obscured by the mountain.
So it goes. A lot to juggle, but I finally got everything I needed to get the shot. The moon is partially obscured by the mountain; for one person, this might be a crisis—they would want the moon near the mountain, and fully visible. But I wound up really liking this composite shot with the moon partially obscured as it is rising.
A few additional notes:
Why isn’t the moon brighter? This was shot about two hours before sunset. So the sky was very bright, and although the air was really clear for summer, there is still enough haze near the horizon to make the moon a little harder to see. (Note how the moon looks brighter in the highest image.)
The clouds near the mountain were constantly changing. So the composite photo is made up of one photo that shows the mountain and the clouds and sky, and then the other photos have only the moon image included. Otherwise, the wind was moving the trees, so they looked smeared, and much more of the mountain would be obscured if the clouds were added up from all the images.
The photos were taken with my best camera, and an unusual lens choice. The camera is the Phase One IQ4 150 back, attached to a bellows that allows me to put almost any lens I want on the front. I chose a real antique: a Mamiya 210mm f/4.5 APO/L, a lens from more than 50 years ago which was part of the Mamiya RB67 system. It’s an extremely sharp lens, even today, and out of the available options it has the right combination of magnification and image quality for an important shot like this one. It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s awkward to use—and it delivers great shots.
I also got some photographs with the Sony camera, which I will share in another post soon.