Full Moon

[Steven Dempsey]

When you are shooting the moon and want any kind of detail, you are going to sacrifice all other details in your scene. This means any trees or mountains will essentially be blacked out. Of course, you can get that detail back in the landscape but at the cost of detail in the moon (it would be dramatically overexposed to a white ball).

What I did for this shot was waited until dawn was breaking. In reality, the scene was much lighter than this. The sky was somewhat bright and the details of the tree could be easily seen. The contrast of the moon versus the rest of the scene had dramatically diminished so I closed my iris down to the point where I could barely get an exposure on the tree and the detail in the moon.

Had this really been a night shot, it would have been impossible to shoot in a single exposure. Shooting HDR would have been the only other option but that would not have yielded such a natural look.

[amitseo]

Really nice shot.i like it

[sdo]

Very nice exposure. I have such a hard time getting a moon like that to be properly exposed while not making the rest of the image underexposed. Could you post your camera settings?

Thanks,
Steve

[x_eternity_x]

It still looks mostly like a silhouette to me, but the sky is rather nice and you have a lot of detail in the moon---very nice shot. I may have to try this sometime--I just stay up till the sun is coming up rather than get up that early...