Places
Shooting the blood moon above Malibu
Got an invite from a bike friend to cowboy camp up on their property above Malibu. Of course I brought my tripod and captured the moon as it rose over the mountains.
The event
This was the January 31, 2018 ‘super blue blood moon’ — a total lunar eclipse that lined up with a blue moon (the second full moon of the month) and a supermoon all at once, which hadn’t happened together over the Americas in decades. Shooting it is the usual moon problem: it’s far brighter than it looks, so you expose for the moon and not the sky, and you need a long lens (or a lot of cropping) to make it big in frame. During totality it dims and goes red, and that’s when you can finally balance it against the landscape. NASA tracks the upcoming ones if you want to plan the next.