Silhouettes in a Giant Moon rise, Captured Using a 1200mm Lens

Real photo - no Photoshop required.

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Silhouettes in a Giant Moon-rise, Captured Using a 1200mm Lens?

Earlier this week, photographer Philip Schmidli of Lucerne, Switzerland captured this incredible photograph of a biker’s silhouette in front of a giant moon rising in the horizon.

Schmidli reveals that he has been trying to capture this photograph for four months or so, but complications got in the way of previous attempts. Clouds got in the way of the full moon in January, and bad weather interfered with his attempts in February and March as well.

Finally, during this latest attempt with April’s full moon, the weather cleared up and gave the “green light” for this photo idea.

He first spent hours exploring Google Earth, searching for the perfect location to shoot the image. He needed a hill in the distance that would allow his subject to be framed by the moon rise .The he ended up deciding on this hill.

To have the subject be dwarfed by the size of the moon, he needed a large gap between the camera and the hill. The distance for this shoot ended up being 1.3 kilometers, or 0.8 miles.

Photographs by Philipp Schmidli