Timelapse of Photographers Hunting a Supermoon

Photography Tips  •  Time-lapse Photography

Next time a supermoon rolls around, take a moment not to watch the moon, but the photographers swarming in front of it. You’ll see a scene that looks an awful lot like this creative short film, made by nighttime photo specialist Mark Gee:

Gee wrote a lengthy article about how to shoot a giant moon, and it’s filled with useful tips and insight into how time-consuming finding the right angle can be. He shoots with a super-telephoto lens a few kilometers away from the photographers in the frame—the moon looks so large because the lens acts as a telescope, though the people still appear small. He also strongly endorses PhotoPills, an app that calculates where the moon will be on any given day.

He shot the movie on September 27, 2015, with the help of a few fellow photographers in Wellington, New Zealand. He caught the moon from its earliest ascent, shown above, and waited for it to rise well above the heads of the photographers, with whom he communicated via two-way radios from 1.5 kilometers away.

“I never get tired of photographing the sun, moon and stars. It can be challenging and this is where planning plays a big part….It puts me on a natural high knowing that I’ve successfully captured what I had imagined in my mind.”