Landing on the Moon

So I got a new bicycle today. :D Considering I live in Montana in the winter, I decided it would be worth it to invest in a fat bike for riding in the snow. Even it was for one season, being able to ride all winter is well worth the money to me. The bike I eventually decided on was the Surly Moonlander. I reallyyyy liked the PugOps (just because of the name) but the Moonlander has a lot better spec and has much wider tires. And the for the deal I get it at, I can't complain about the price difference.

Building it up today was so weird. I don't think I've ever had a bike come in a super sized box because the wheels are bigger than the frame. Chuck and I had a good 5 minute session of disbelief when we first saw the things. 4.8 inch tires are ridonkulous(ly awesome).

After I got it all put together, I of course had to do picture of it. And of course it was 10pm. Hmmm, why not go to the beach and ride it under the moonlight! It's a Moonlander after all.

I met up with Victor and the usual crew at the beach, and we set up with the shot. It was a challenge to get the right composition. At first, I was looking down a straight section of beach, and it just wasn't working. Turning around to the curved part helped, and Victor's suggestion of moving toward the water helped a lot.

The bike rides amazingly btw. Deep sand, drift wood, seaweed...you name it the bike just ate it up and forged ahead. It was truly incredible to ride that easily over those kind of obstacles with almost no problems. I think I'll be having some fun in the future with this thing....

For the photo, Cody triggered the shutter, then I rode down the beach till he yelled stop, and then we repeated that a few times. This painted the ground with my head lamp. I underexposed by 2 stops so that the light from my headlamp would be the only bright light on the ground.

After we got those, I took a properly exposed shot of the landscape. This was at ISO250, 18mm, f3.5, and 30s.

To wrap up shooting, we popped a strobe on me from about 20 ft away and up high at 1/8 power. We had the manual remote hooked up, so it was a 30s exposure with me frozen in it.

For editing, I picked out my favorite shots and headed over to Ps. The lighten blend mode took care of most of the blending, and layer masks took over the rest. I just took the light trails from those photos, and just the frozen image of me from that layer. From the proper exposure layer, I drew in some of the sky and all the water to get some pop out of those areas.

In Lr, I first converted to b/w, then raised the shadows and blacks all the way. Well, the blacks only a bit, but the whites a lot. I also upped the highlights a lot. I then did some local adjustments to the sky, water, and frozen me. To the sky and me, I upped the clarity. For the water, I just upped the highlights.

I went through a couple different versions of the same image, so here's the two last ones. I thought I was done, but then I found something and changed it.  Can you tell what?

See you tomorrow!