Haunting Photos Taken Under the Full Moon Turn Night Into Day

Most photographers would not dare to use moonlight as their key light, but Darren Almond is not most photographers.

The fine art photographer from the U.K. has been using the full Moon to illuminate night photos since 1998. The technique requires an exposure time of 15 minutes — sometimes even more than that.

In his book, Darren Almond. Fullmoon, the light of the Moon is eerily enhanced, infusing the landscape with haunting ideas of nature and time.

This expanded edition includes over 370 images — from Yosemite to the Japanese seashore, from Patagonia to Bermuda, and from the Alps to the English meadows — in a beautiful journey around the globe at night.

“With long exposures, you can never see what you are shooting. But you are giving the landscape longer to express itself,” Almond says

“With the shutter kept open for over a quarter of an hour, rivers, meadows, mountains, and seashores are illuminated almost like daybreak, but the atmosphere is different: a mild glow emanates even from the shadows, star-lines cross the sky, and water blankets the earth like a misty froth,” says Taschen, the book’s publisher.

“Taken from a point of immersion in the natural surroundings, Almond’s Fullmoon photographs allow the landscape to reveal its own history and suggest the direction its future might take.”

“The series circles around the possibility of romantic ideas of nature today: majestic American mountains, austere Arctic ice fields, picturesque rocks by the seashore in Japan, and, most intimately viewed, the nature of Britain, whose painterly subjects are closest to home,” the publisher adds.

Darren Almond was born in 1971 in Wigan, England. He is a conceptual artist whose work in photography, film, and sculpture revolves around themes of personal memory, cultural history, and time. His major solo exhibitions include shows at the ICA and the Tate Britain in London, Kunsthalle Zürich, K21 Düsseldorf, Museum Folkwang Essen, SITE Santa Fe, and Art Tower Mito in Japan.

Darren Almond. Fullmoon is published by Taschen.

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Image creditsPhotographs by Darren Almond