Super moon over Manhattan

Last night I photographed the super moonrise over lower Manhattan with the new World Trade Center. I primarily used the new Nikon D810, but also used the Fuji X-T1 with 18-135mm zoom for some tests I was doing with it.

A super moon is not only larger than a typical full moon because of its proximity to the earth, it is also brighter. This makes it more difficult to integrate into a night cityscape where you want to hold detail in both the city and the moon. To get around this I bracketed the shots heavily with several stop differences between the city photo and the moon photo. Later I merged the two in Photoshop so the moon would have its full detail.

Lower Manhattan with World Trade Center and super moonrise taken with the Nikon D810 and 70-200mm f/4 Nikon zoom.  With the ISO set for 64 the exposure of the city was 1/2.5 second, while the exposure for the moon was 1/25th second.

For this view I wanted a time-lapse to blur the water. Taken with the Fuji X-T1 and 18-135mm lens at an ISO of 200, the exposure was 30 seconds for the city at f/22, but 1/15th second for the moon at the same aperture.