Halloween Moon – Shooting for the middle

I was out walking the dog on Halloween evening, on a local trail loop I often take from my cabin. It was dusk when we started out, and for 40 minutes or so, I was walking mostly by the light of my headlamp. There is about six inches of snow on the ground which muffled all the noise but my shuffling feet. As the sun’s light faded from the sky, stars and planets started to pop out overhead and it was anything but spooky. The fact that it was October 31 hardly entered my mind, until, that is, the moon rose. It appeared through the trees near the end of our walk. The few high clouds caused a glow around the nearly-full moon through the hillside spruces. And I thought to myself, “by god, now THAT looks like Halloween.” And I ran the rest of the way home for my camera.

A few minutes later, and back outside, I struggled with how to make the image. First I needed a long lens, so I put on the longest one I own, my 500mm f4.0. That gave me the reach to make the moon good size in the frame. And then there was the problem with the brightness. A too long exposure would show the spruces but blow out the moon, while a shorter exposure would show the details of the moon, but the trees would fade to darkness. I thought about the possibility of digitally combining two images to get the best of both worlds, but confounding that was the composition I was striving for: the moon partly obscured by the trees. So I split the difference. I shot the moon right to the point where it started to lose detail in the highlights. The camera’s histogram was still pushed way to the left (meaning it was a really dark image) but I thought a bit of tweaking in Lightroom might allow me to pull back some detail.

Then there was the question of focus. These trees were at least 1/4 mile away but the depth of field on the 500mm is so narrow that I could not keep both the trees and the moon in focus, so I had to choose. I shot a few each way and decided in the end I prefer the focus to be on the trees rather than the moon. The top, and second image here are focused that way, but the third places the focus on the moon. I’ll let you decide if I got that right.

The moon finally above the trees, I headed back inside and loaded up the images onto my computer. I opened them in Lightroom, bumped the exposure a couple of stops, then pushed the highlights slider all the way to the left (knocking down the intensity of the bright moon) and the shadows slider all the way to the right (bringing up as much of the spruces as I could) and then did some fiddling with the blacks and whites sliders to make the contrast look decent. Before long I had something pretty similar to what I was able to see with my eyes.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about photo manipulation (find it HERE) where I discussed the making of an image that I envisioned but could not see with my naked eye. This is a case of the opposite. The camera could not take the image I saw and so I needed the computer to bring a semblance of reality back into the image.

But I still wasn’t done. After those manipulations, the image had an ugly yellow color-cast so I dropped the saturation way down and then fiddled with the tint a bit to make a few variations. The three versions here each have a slightly different tinting. I think I like the grayish-maroon cast of the top image the best. Thoughts?

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