What me photoshop?????? Never….
Surely you jest, you say. And I do. Couldn’t resist having a little fun with the “SuperMoon” this weekend. This is a composite shot from my backyard and the Fox Memorial tower across the street.
It loses a little in the translation to jpg, should be a little brighter. But you get the idea. With all the hype about the super moon this weekend I had to get out. Although it looked like the clouds were going to sock it in, they managed to clear enough around 10pm to get a little shooting in. So how do you shoot a shot like this? Beats me, I couldn’t do it. So its obviously a composite of two shots that I threw together.
So first the moon. Shot from my back porch with a Canon 1DS Mark II, 100-400 Zoom @ 400 mm with a tamaron 2x teleconverter. Shot at 1/100 @ f16 w iso 400. Then in lightroom I added a little contrast to make it pop a bit more.
Next in Photoshop I cut out the moon by selecting the dark background, inverting the selection, refining the edge a little and then copy. Whala! I have a moon.
The next step is to shoot the tower. After shooting the moon from the back yard I headed across the street to shoot images of the tower with the moon in the background. Mostly silhouettes, with the moon above the top of the tower. I didn’t get any shots that knocked my socks off, but of course I remembered to do some playing while I was shooting, so I came up with following shot of the tower.
This was shot using a Canon 1DS Mark II, 100-400 Zoom @ 160 mm . Shot at 30 sec @ f13 w ISO 1000. The bright area is the moon moving through the clouds during the 30 second exposure. I also lit the tower using the LED headlamp I was using. I rather like the muted look and the soft sky due to the motion blur. So its a simple matter of pasting the moon into this image after I cleaned up the branches on the left and straightend the tower. Amazing the focus looks okay even though I could not see the tower to focus while setting up the shot, just the silhouette.
So, all in all, a different shot that was pretty easy to do. I didn’t want to spend too much time with it because I knew that it would not be a natural looking shot. This was more for fun than anything else. Although I may play with it a little more to see what other fun I can create. But the important thing is I got a little practice shooting at night, instead of watching it from the couch.
Here are a couple more untouched shots. The challenge is getting a crisp shot of the moon, while having a long enough exposure to get a crisp silhoutte of the tower. The obvious solution would be to light the tower sufficiently to get the desired shot. But I didn’t have a good light me to be able to do that. And the moon was moving far to fast for the long exposures necessary for a striking silhouette. Again the jpg’s are quite a bit darker than the origionals
Keep on Klikin!