Shooting Portraits with a Giant Moon Using a 1120mm Lens
Photographer Eric Pare recently went out into the desert and shot a set of photos showing a model sitting next to the moon. And the size of the moon in the photos wasn’t faked. Pare managed to capture a gigantic moon by using a 1120mm lens and having his model sit very far away.
To achieve the lens compression he needed to make the moon (a distant object) look bigger than usual, Pare placed himself at a great distance from his model:
“It turned out to be much easier than expected,” Pare says. “During the shooting, I realized that I was able to step down the aperture to f/64 by using the extenders. This gave me a very dirty low-quality image, but the fact that the moon and Kim were quite in focus was very mind-boggling.”
Here’s a photo Pare captured at 1120mm, f/64, 1/125s, and ISO 1600:
At this aperture, all the dust specks on the sensor show up in the image as ugly dark splotches. By cleaning up the photo in Photoshop, however, Pare was left with a usable image that was created using a single exposure.
Pare also used focus stacking at larger apertures to get the moon and his model both in focus. Here’s a focus stacked image that used separate photos captured at 1120mm, f/11, 1/200s, and ISO 100:
Here’s a short 3.5-minute behind-the-scenes look at how this shoot was done:
You can find more of Pare’s work on his website and Instagram. The model and dancer, Kim Henry, has more work on Instagram as well.
