Montreal In Pictures

August 30 2012

With the moon being almost full tonight and the sky clear, I wandered up avenue du Parc to about the band stand just south of the George Étienne Cartier Monument to get a shot of the moon rising over the downtown skyline. Since the moon only requires a short exposure but the skyline needs a fairly long one, I made the following shot from compositing 2 separate exposures.

Moon over Montreal

The moon was of course a lot smaller than that in reality, but since it was one of the better shots I’ve managed to take of the moon, I couldn’t bring myself to shrink it any further ;-/

The composite shots used to make the image were:

Nearly full moon
ISO 100 – 300mm – f19 – 1/125 sec

Montreal skyline
ISO 100 – 28mm – f4.8 – 8 secs

I recently found a great app for planning the best place and time to shoot sun and moon rising and setting called The Photographer’s Ephemeris. They do an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch and Android app, but I went for the free desktop version. It basically allows you to check where the moon or sun will be at any given date and time. Here’s a screen grab of the map I used to plan tonight’s shot.

Screenshot of The Photographer’s Ephemeris

The fact I ended up doing a composite shot sort of made using the tool a bit redundant, but at least I knew that if I went out at a certain time the moon would be high enough to see, so guess it was still useful to check it before heading out.

The shot below is what my normal moon shots look like.

Moon over Montreal
ISO 100 – 18mm – f4.8 – 8 sec

I was planning to take a few more shots from different locations but there was a sudden deluge of police sirens coming from all directions and I could see they were closing avenue de Parc at the corner of des Pins close to where I live.

So I packed up my tripod quickly and headed back down the street to see what was happening. It appeared that a police car had crashed into another car just south of Prince Arthur. I heard that the driver of the car was arrested for DUI and that no one was seriously injured. Not sure if the crash was the result of a police pursuit or the driver just lost control and happened to hit a police car.