Hm… shooting the moon is challenging! (but you know what they say, “if you shoot for the moon, you’ll at least end up among the stars”)…. From what I’ve tried with lunar eclipses (nothing impressive to show), I’d try including more than just the moon in your photo. It’s kind of like shooting a sunset. A lot of people see a great sunset, and then run up to it with their smartphones and take a picture of the sky—and they end up with a sunset photo that doesn’t really grab the viewer with a sense of story or place. An artistic moon shot is kind of the same way. You want to include more than just the moon.
I think one of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to shoot the moon as it is rising or setting.
Gibbous moons are great for that, because they’ll be fairly low in the sky as the sun is going up (or down) so your sky might actually have some red in it. The best thing about this is that the moon will look huge, and you’ll have a foreground to work with. That way, you’ll have a shot of more than just the moon.
The other day, I was riding down a highway with my dad, and the sun had just set, and in the west, the moon was also setting (I think it was a crescent). It was obviously large, and the sunset-colored sky just made it look amazing. I didn’t have time to get my camera, but the potential for a great photo was there—I could have used the highway as a foreground which would have naturally drawn the eye to the moon at one end. The cars would have helped add a sense of story.
Another artistic method is to shoot a huge moon with a strongly recognizable silhouette of something in front of it (like a weathervane, a cactus, or a wolf 🙂 ). The way to get a large looking moon is to use a longer lens. Personally—and I’m assuming this is the case with most of us on this form—my longest lens is a 200mm (some of you might have access to 250mm), which isn’t quite long enough to get a very big moon, but use the longest lens you have.
I hope these two quick tips were useful! And good luck! (I want to try my hand at milky way photography sometime. We’ll see if anything comes out of it!)