Orange Moonrise

[Tim Seaver]

I received a call from a bunch of rowdies atop Moosilauke last night, all howling at the moon in the dread of night.

They encouraged me to go out and take a peek, and this is what I saw:

Orange Moonrise, July 18 2008

The image above is a composite of two separate exposures, one for the clouds:

(1 sec. @ F5.6)

and one for the moon:

(1/15 @ F11)

Both were at ISO 320 with a Canon 5D, using a 300 F4 with a 1.4x teleconverter (420mm)

To make the image, I cut out the properly exposed moon, and pasted it over the overexposed "hole" in the clouds image. I downsized the clouds image by 200 pixels before pasting in the moon, to "shrink" the bright area without interfering with the nice orange glow (which is very close to how it appeared to my eye in the final image). To soften the edge of the moon, I selected it and feathered the edge 2 pixels. The color is unadjusted, using the "Landscape" picture style.

 

[Chip]

cool, I like it ! I tried the other night also; we had some storm clouds moving across the orange moon like a grey and black hand.

 

[NewHampshire]

This worked out real good. Very eerie, and the detail is perfect!

Driving back last night I was looking at the orange moon wishing I had my Camera with me (I left it at home opting to replace the weight for an extra liter of water and a water filter on our Bonds traverse.) It was absoultely awesome looking as it was hanging over Fraconia Ridge!

Brian

 

[Mark Schaefer]

Very nicely done, Tim. And a good explanation of your process to produce the image.

The human eye and mind can perceive wider ranges of light intensity / contrast than any single photographic image can capture. Restoring what we actually saw is legitimate in every sense.

Warm humid nights do produce some amazing moon photos.