On shooting the moon

Summary: Resizing the depiction of anything within a photograph, by any method, always disqualifies the resulting photograph from TTG.

  • 1. There are many big moons out there

    Anyone who has looked at many travel photos (or travel postcards) has seen them, for almost every tourist destination in the world: a photo of an enormous moon hovering over a dusk or night cityscape or landscape.

  • 2. Why moon enlargement is so popular

    Even though a photograph records the moon as pretty much the same size wherever it is in the sky, when viewed “in person” the moon appears much larger to the human eye when the moon is near the horizon than it appears when it is overhead.

    Generations of photographers have been frustrated by this optical illusion (the difference between “what I saw” vs. “what the camera rendered”).

    Making matters worse, most cityscapes and landscapes are photographed with a wide-angle lens, and the more wide-angle the lens used to take a photograph, the smaller the moon will appear in the photograph.

  • 3. Enlarging the moon disqualifies the photo from TTG

    Those frustrated photographers often substitute a larger moon for what the camera rendered in a single exposure, whether they perform the substitution in the darkroom, on the computer, or via a double-exposure.

    To viewers and to TTG), the “tools” used to resize the moon don’t matter.

    The moon as depicted in the final version of a photo either does remain the same size relative to the rest of the scene that the camera recorded or it does not remain the same relative size.

    If it does not, it’s not TTG.