I went out scouting locations for the intention of shooting the full moon this past Sunday, along with my good friend Nick. I wanted to take shots of the full moon rising under the tree from this location. It’s about an hour and a half drive from Edmonton and we got to the field with the moon just starting to rise. I had saved this location with my Google Maps in my phone and when we got to the point I said to Nick, “This can’t be the right place. Where is the tree?!” Well turns out it was the right place, and someone or something had knocked down the tree! It didn’t matter though because I had already noticed there was a large hill behind the tree, blocking out the rising moon. I drove my car farther up the hill, through some trees, and then reached the top. A wide prairie landscape view was before us with canola fields on the left and wheat fields on the right. I didn’t want any part of the road in the shot so I chose to set up for the wheat field. I made two images from this location, both panoramic images. This shot is two rows of four landscape oriented frames. It also includes one moon shot blended in that was taken at 105mm. I then sized it down with Photoshop, because I wanted the moon to be larger in the photo then it would have been taken at 30mm. The colors in the clouds from the setting sun were so intense, I had to desaturate the colors in post. I used a polarizer and 3 stop hard edge grad to make this image, and very little color correction was applied.

“Full Moon Rising” Rural Alberta.

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