Full moon rising

[DanK]

Not at all sure about this one. C&C welcome.

[Geoff F]

Basically OK for me, but I think the moon could be slightly lower and towards the right.

Alternatively, crop to remove the moon and boost the highlights a little?

[FootLoose]

I like the way the positioned the trees to lead up to the moon, Dan. The sky feels a little too bright for me, though. And it looks like there is some colour noise in the blue? It appears to me to have some little purplish splotches in it.

[flashback]

Dan, have you thought about converting it to B&W? Give it a look, I think it might work in B&W.

[Ziggy]

I think the tree tops pointing at the moon are the best feature of this image.

I would try a crop to make that stand out.

[Wandjina]

It is a nice shot, Dan, but I feel like Geoff F, that the moon needs to be moved downwards and to the right. BUT having said that, how does one "move" the moon? Do you want the photo to be a record of what you actually saw and photographed. Then cropping is probably your only solution. However, if you want to use it as the basis for something more "creative," then Photoshop is your answer. It all depends on what you want to use the photo for.

My "photoshopping" is a little rough, but you get the idea

[rachel]

Ah, I love the moon and I like this photo.

I would play only with contrast to try to bring out the features on the moon (I'm not often very successful at this, my moon photos usually get nothing more than cropping) but I would never never ever move the moon.

And crop it out????? No!!!!!!!

[TonyW]

I quite like the original composition although it would not hurt to move the moon a little away from the corner. I think it is better if it is darkened and with more contrast, especially the moon. although the blue splotches are then exaggerated, so that the sky would need a different treatment.

[GBO25]

I like it Dan. The trees pointing to the moon makes it a great composition. The moon doesn't look round which I guess is either lens distortion toward the corner or maybe the length of exposure. It needs some discrete noise added to smooth out the sky.

[IzzieK]

I am with Rachel...+1 to her comments. When I saw your title it reminds me of that same song title by Neil Halstead...now I will go back to bed with that song in my mind...I will hold the thought of thinking Beethoven's music to make me sleep instead...

[JohnRostron]

Ah, I love the moon and I like this photo.

I would play only with contrast to try to bring out the features on the moon (I'm not often very successful at this, my moon photos usually get nothing more than cropping) but I would never never ever move the moon.

And crop it out????? No!!!!!!!

I would definitely agree with that! As Graham said: The trees pointing to the moon makes it a great composition.

Graham also commented that the moon does not look round. Looks OK to me, but bear in mind that when the moon (and also the sun) are close to the horizon, they appear more elliptical, expanded horizontally. This is a side effect of the light rays are passing through more atmosphere nearer the horizon.

John

[rachel]

Looking at it again, you have enough detail in that moon to really do something with it. When I tilt the screen back (you know, so it goes all dark) the moon looks spectacular silver and grey. You probably have enough light in the sky to afford to lose some in darkening/contrasting the moon.

The shape of the moon could be down to it being a day or two either side of full moon - that might account for the brightish sky. The full moon comes up as the sun sets and I find it's then too bright in contrast to the rest of the sky to get a good photo. This looks like it might have been taken the day before a full moon, which is when I usually try. It means you can use an exposure low enough to get the detail on the moon and still see something of the detail in the rest of the image.

I think you could get a really beautiful photo out of this

[rachel]

Not sure if I've attached this properly, but this is a very quick 10 second edit with Irfan View to try to bring out the detail of the moon.

There are far more sophisticated progams out there (and far cleverer people than I) that could probably do a better job, but just to show it's possible.

Yes, the sky is now much darker which is why I usually try to get moon shots a day or two before or after the real full moon, so that I can afford to lose some light.

[DanK]

Thanks, all. A very interesting set of comments.

Greg, re the color noise: I think this is a result of aggressive PP and jpeg degradation when I exported (even though I used a fairly high quality). There is no visible noise in the original, and just the faintest hint in LR before exporting. I'll modify the postprocessing.

Jack--I hadn't thought about B&W. I just tried a simple conversion, and it doesn't look promising. Almost the entire image is areas with very little tonal variation. It's almost a three-tone rather than a gray tone. Here is the histogram. I can play more with this.



Rachel: I agree, I should do something to bring out the contrast in the moon.

All in all, I think the comments suggest that this needs more careful processing than I gave it.

Jeff, Martin, and Tony: in this case, I don't want to move the moon. I like having it where it really was. All a matter of taste.

Thanks again. Very helpful comments.

Dan

[DanK]

A quick second try, following some of the suggestions in the thread:

[Marie Hass]

I love how the tree branches "point" to the moon

Having the foreground as a silhouette allows the eye to travel to the background.

Marie

[rachel]

Dan, I really like that now and its encouraging to see what can be done starting from a photo in which the moon seems overwhelmingly bright and almost whited out.

[DanK]

Marie and Rachel,

Many thanks. Rachel, the key is selections, which allow you to edit parts of the document. I used both conventional selections and luminosity masks in Photoshop for this edit, but the latter was more for my own education. (I'm new to that technique.) Regular selections work fine for this.

Dan

[rachel]

Oh, I have so much to learn on this!