Reek of Mordor

[Wirefox]

A bit fuzzy wuzzy...the clouds kept moving but I thought I would share anyway. Beautiful skyscapes over here last night. Pity I did not have the lens or technical ability to capture them.

[Dave Humphries]

Nice one Steve,

I tried some like this a month or two ago and got zilch usable from them this is very impressive, I only got 'blacky wacky' from mine, not 'fuzzy wuzzy'

May I ask what the camera EXIF and PP was?

I did shoot some last night too, but I'm not expecting miracles as I was hoping to shoot through a clear patch later on, but that never came!

Cheers,

[Geoff F]

I have found that the only way to get any results from 'a cloudy moon' is to set your aperture to F8 or F11 and work out a best shutter speed to freeze the clouds, which may be relatively fast if there is a gale blowing! Then set an ISO which will give you the desired settings; and keep adjusting the exposure compensation until something works.

Then hope that the clouds are prepared to cooperate and arrange themselves into a decent photogenic pose.

But your photo looks reasonably good to me. I think that over sharp clouds look unnatural.

[Donald]

Steve

Love it. What a range of tone and colour!

Noted Geoff's advice and Dave's request for info on how you did it. I'd appreciate this too.

[GillR]

A bit fuzzy wuzzy...the clouds kept moving but I thought I would share anyway. Beautiful skyscapes over here last night. Pity I did not have the lens or technical ability to capture them.

Looks like you did a pretty good job to me!

I don't mid the clouds being "fuzzy wuzzy" at all, I think it aids the atmosphere.

[Wirefox]

Many thanks for your comments. This image is growing on me tonight. I did take a few shots but my ancient tripod needs hip replcement and I was getting oof images until I upped the ISO and used mirror lock up.

EXIF

Exposure Time: 0.6s
Aperture:f/8.0
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 200mm on a Canon 28-200 USM
Aperture Priority (no exposure bias)

PP; If memory serves...denoise in UFRaw (GIMP). Then select moon (I used ellipse with 10pt feather) Invert selection. This step allows me to play around with the clouds without blowing out the moon. Use levels to paint the sky and a quick shallow curve to add vibrancy. Deselect and use the blur brush ramped up to full throttle to blend the edge of the moon. A quick USM to taste and Bobs your Uncle (he certainly is not mine)

Hope this helps

Steve

[cneedha]

Nice work! I tried this same shot a couple of months ago and made a mess of things- the exposure needed to get the moon right gave no cloud details and vice versa (sp?).

[CNelson]

Wow! Great drama.

Chuck

[Colin Southern]

Thought I'd see how it looked with a Photoshop 30-Second makeover (TM!) ... I just pushed the vibrance to the max, and did a bit of agressive sharpening (not the best on a low-res image).

Wadda ya think?

[Wirefox]

Whoops! I forgot about this one. Colin you have extracted some great colours from this image...very nice as usual. It reminds me of the skies in those canadian frontier paintings. I can certainly see Nathaniel Bumppo stalking under a moon like that.

Steve