Hello Reader,
Combining trees with the moon in a photo is difficult in a mountainous region. The higher the mountains, the later the moon will rise. And the darker it gets. If it is too dark, the exposure time gets longer, and the moon will be blurry. You can increase the ISO, but if the ISO is too high, the picture gets noisy and unsharp. You have to keep this in mind if you want an image with trees and the moon. The hardest part of this all is finding a good spot to shoot. Satellite images help a lot. But they have the disadvantage that they are not 3D. You only see the area from the top down. So there is a lot of guesswork involved.
Taking a picture of a tree with the moon in a flat area is easy.
You could take the shot from a higher mountain than the mountains where the moon will rise. In this case, the moon will rise sooner than at a lower elevation. But getting there when there is still snow in the mountains is arduous.
I found a flat area only 40 minutes from where I live. And the mountains in the distance aren't so high, around 1'100-1'900 metres. It is a small nature reserve with wide-open fields, wetlands, and trees. Unfortunately, roads zigzag through the area, and there are also some farmhouses. There is a driving ban, but few drivers abide by the regulations. That can get quite annoying.
I planned the shot from home. There is an app called PeakFinder. The app can show you a picture of an area with its mountains, their names and heights. And it also tells you the time at which mountain the sun and the moon rise and set from where you stand. Other apps like The Photographer's Ephemeris and PhotoPills are way more complicated.
The place where I wanted to take the picture didn't work. It looked good on the satellite image, though. The problem was the farmhouses. I didn't want them in the photo. So I had to look for another composition.
I found a composition that worked, more or less. In the bottom part of the image, I had the upper half of trees. It looked okay. When I processed the picture, the composition didn't convince me. It looked bad. In the end, I cropped the photo. At least the mountains have trees. Yet, I would have liked trees in the foreground.
Stay creative,
Ars