TURN NIGHT INTO DAY

Using a full moon to illuminate the landscape and your camera's settings, you can capture surreal nighttime images astrophotography

It is possible to turn night into day, capturing nighttime landscapes in a way that closely mimics what the eye sees, but also takes advantage of the bright light from a full moon. Using your camera's astrophotography settings produces a surreal result - the scene looks as though it was shot in daylight but the giveaway is that stars are visible in the bright blue sky.

The best time for shooting this technique is in the seven days around a full moon, with the full moon itself being optimal. A clear evening is also best so you can see the stars in the sky and, more importantly, so that the light from the moon isn't significantly reduced by the moon being obscured by clouds. However, a small amount of cloud covering in the direction you're shooting isn't a problem.

For this technique, we'll shoot two exposures - one shorter, higher ISO exposure for the stars and a second longer exposure with a lower ISO and the lens stopped down to create a larger depth-of-field for the ground. Then, after initial processing in Lightroom, these will be merged in Photoshop to provide pinpoint stars in the sky with a sharp foreground and large depth-of-field.

Shooting steps

1 Setup in daylight  set up your camera and compose the shot during daylight. Use the virtual horizon to make sure that the camera is level on both axes and use the on-screen grid to assist with rule-of-thirds composition. Here, the exposure was increased so the foreground was clear in the frame before resetting everything.

2 Set manual focus  Set your lens to MF mode as this offers more control than autofocus. Also, make sure that image stabilisation, whether optical or in-body, is switched off because this can reduce sharpness when cameras are attached to a tripod.