Problem With The Moon - Ideas?

Bryce Wilson

So as I was pulling into my driveway tonight, I looked up at the moon and saw what I thought was a pretty nice picture waiting to happen. I Parked the car and took a few snaps. I couldn't figure out how to get both the detail in the face of the moon and the detail in the surrounding clouds at the same time. If I set the camera for the moon itself, I lost the cloud detail and vice versa. Grabbing a tripod and doing an HDR type thing wasn't an option as the moon was moving in the sky too fast, I would have lost it.

Any ideas on setting that would have let me accomplish what I wanted?

Thanks.

kdog

Shoot in RAW, as hot as possible without blowing out the moon. Then use your raw converter's tool for bringing up shadow detail to brighten the clouds. That would be the fill-light slider in ACR for example.

Richard

Another option would be using exposure bracketing (if your camera supports that) and then combining two exposures in post. That would make it easier to fine tune the bright moon and dark clouds separately.

wolf911

I was seeing the same thing in the sky here, but didn't have time to take pics, but I would of went with the bracketing to cover the range and than blend them together.

Bryce Wilson

I was afraid to try bracketing as I didn't have a tripod. Does that work OK hand held when combining images? I should add that I was shooting at 400 mm.

Kdog, I will try playing with a couple of the images I have and see what I can come up with.

Thanks
.

Richard

For a moon and clouds shot, you can easily bracket without a tripod. If the software you use can automatically align the images, you're home free, but if not, it is easy to separate the moon from the background with a mask. Unless you are doing an HDR (not recommended) you'll probably want to do a mask in any event. Since there's nothing but clouds around the moon, touching up is a snap.

Bryce Wilson

Thanks Richard!