Last week I was trying to photograph the full moon. The weather here was horrible for it. I did have one image that I thought would be a good image for a post on Black and White Photography the full moon. I am also using it for monochrome madness this week over on my main blog and I will put a link here to that post here on Leanne Cole Photography.
This is my submission for MM33 this week. I have had the image on Facebook, Flickr and Google+ and a few people have asked me how I got it, so I thought I would share it here. I have explained it a few times how it is actually two images put together. The moon is so bright and if you try and take a photo of the clouds and the moon, then you can only get one part of it.
This was the original image for the clouds. I like the way I have got the clouds, but, as you can see, the moon is totally burned out and there is no detail in it at all. It really isn’t what I was looking for.
This was taken a few seconds later, and you can see that there is a lot more detail in the moon, but all the clouds are gone. I took the image with the clouds and then I took the image with the moon, cut the moon out and moved it onto the blown moon with the clouds. It has given the moon a lovely halo. The one I put on my social media sites was in colour, but I did something weird to it when I was processing it. I am not sure what, but when I decided to redo it, it seemed like a good idea to do it black and white as well. The reworked on turned out a lot better.
It really isn’t a good reflection of what the evening was. It really was a night of cloud watching, not moon watching. We would start to see the moon popping out from the clouds, and we would jump up and see if we could get some photos before it disappeared again. It was really frustrating.
Amazing work and stunning result. I agree with Robin, managed to get some moon images on Friday night, but they are all so boring. Still haven’t figured out what to do. Thank you for this great explanation.
No problem at all Lore, I think it was by accident that I got the clouds, and then I realised I could merge the two images. None of blood moon ones came out unfortunately. Thank you.
Hi, Leanne:
Great image. And perfect in B&W. Usually close-ups of the moon with no foreground or context are pretty boring, but not this one. Thanks for explaining the technique. And you are right; the halo in the combined image gives a really nice extra touch. Not to mention the bird silhouetted against the moon.
Thank you Robin. One of the people I was with said that she was trying to get bird, and I hadn’t seen it, so I was very surprised when I got home and saw it there in the image. I don’t know if she has seen it yet.
I agree, I think giving the image some context is good and it really does reflect what the night was like here.