Mooning at the Eye

Went over to my friends friends house tonight for dinner. Turns out that my friends friend was actually my friend from last year, so that was fun. Plus, it turns out he's an amazing cook and made this awesome thai soup and rice. 

Anyway, as I was sitting in his living room, I noticed the awesome moon that was outside, just peaking through the clouds. When I got home, I headed straight for my camera and went outside to try to capture the amazingness. 

Which turned out to be harder than I originally imagined. The full moon is very bright, but not bright enough to illuminate the clouds around. Well, that's not true, there was light...but, not enough to fall within the dynamic range of my camera. In other words, the moon could be exposed right, and the clouds would be black. Or, the clouds would be okay, but then moon would be like the sun. Plus, the clouds were moving so fast long exposures just wouldn't have worked well. 

So, I thought maybe I could do a HDR composite of the moon. That'd work, right? I fired off a few bracket sequences based off of +-2EV, ISO100, f/5.6, and 1/10s. I was also at 135mm focal length, so fairly telephoto. The shutter was fast enough to stop the cloud movement, which is what was important to me most. That and getting the moon correctly exposed. 

As soon as I got inside, I had an idea. A brilliant idea. Kinda. I thought, what if I could stick a photo of the moon in the pupil of an eye that was inverted?? Wouldn't that be cool? Take a picture of an eye, invert it, then convert to b/w, get the picture of the moon, invert it and stick it in the now white pupil. Yeah, I have random ideas like that. 

But it worked! 

I quickly set up a little eye portrait studio. My strobe with a soft box was just off to the right of the camera, and it provided all of the light for the photo. The soft box is HUGE compared to the eye, so it made really, really, nice soft light. And also kinda a cool reflection....a ring light would have been really cool too....tomorrow!

I had the 50mm on with a 10x converter on the front (it's just a magnifying glass), which would make my eye big enough in the frame. I shot in autofocus, with a little flash light to illuminate my eye for the camera. It's hard to get things in focus, so what I did was fully depress the shutter so that when it focused it'd take the picture immediately. That eliminated me moving and screwing up focus between when focus locked and I took the picture. 

I shot at f/7.1, ISO100, and 1/200s. The strobe was at 1/16 power. 

Editing was surprisingly incredibly simple...all I did was put the two layers in Ps, invert them and the align them. The moon pic was set to lighten, so that only the moon would affect the image and stay in the pupil. I ended up not ever converting to b/w because I loved the blue so much! Super, super simple edit. 

See you tomorrow!