Moon Rise

First photo today was taken from the M trail looking out over Bozeman. It was just with my iPhone, and even edited in Snapseed it was pretty spotty. I like it, but not for the blog.

The next attempt was with my last three chocolates. I resisted eating them just for a picture, that actually didn't turn out that bad. I used the macro lens and just a tungsten lamp. Not going into detail, but it was minimal editing, just a little cooling around the outside of the tree. 

But it still wasn't up to snuff. As my last night in Bozeman for the blog, the photo had to be a little something special. 

I happened to glance outside, and what did I see but stars! Andddddd of course one I drove all the out to the west side of the valley it was cloudy. 

But I couldn't leave empty handed, so I drove out to the next little view spot I have. And boy was that a good idea. I happened to arrive just at moon rise, and what a moon rise it was. The valley was so very dark, and the moon so very bright even though it was partially covered by clouds. 

In other words, I had to choose between getting the mood exposed and the ground or clouds around. Maybe, with bracketing I could get the clouds, but that was about it. 

To determine exposure, I just quickly burned though a couple a different shutter speeds. Eventually, I settled on 1/6, ISO100, and f/5.6 for a fairly decent moon exposure. Time was very quickly running out, so I couldn't be exact. 

The moon was already above the horizon, so I only had time to fire off one bracketed sequence. The moon was just too high up, and the clouds were starting to really obscure it. Better luck next time, right? 

In Ps, I had these three exposures. Now how to blend them? I wanted the correct moon exposure, so there would be detail in it. I also wanted the clouds around it that were so amazing in the overexposed one. How to get both?

At first, I tried using luminosity masks to do the heavy lifting. That kinda worked, but I was left with a black halo around the moon. The overexposed moon had more light spill into the clouds, so it actually appeared larger. The masks wouldn't line up that way. 

So maybe then I could mask out the overexposed moon, and do an overlay on the correct moon. With the screen blending mode, the clouds would appear on the black background of the correct moon. But with the overexposed moon bigger, I had to enlarge the correct moon to be even bigger.

This strategy actually worked really well, and the clouds blended nicely with the moon. I just made a layer mask of the exposed moon, and feathered it on the edges to blend with the moon. 

I'll be doing more moon rise shots in the future I think, just all about timing and placement. And being ready...

See you tomorrow!