Bashful Moon

The Moon hates to be photographed. At least, it seems that way. It is exceedingly difficult to re-create, in a picture, what it looks like when one gazes toward Earth's faithful satellite. Granted, high in a clear sky, the "moon seen" looks the same as the "moon photographed." But if there is anything else in the scene -- clouds, water, or foreground objects -- it is impossible to capture both. To see the non-moon objects, the moon is overpoweringly exposed as a bright disk. An exposure that renders the disk with recognizable landmarks (like the "Man in the Moon") causes all else to disappear into the darkness. (In photographic terms, there is a seven-stop difference in the appropriate camera settings.)

Sometimes clouds help by providing a veil for the bashful Moon's face. But even then, the results can be disappointing. One night I was making some time-exposure test shots. I looked over to a different part of the sky, and beheld a beautiful moon-cloud scene. Swinging the camera over, I fired off a few shots at various exposures. Later, while examining the serendipitous photos, I was unhappy with all of them, for the reason mentioned above. But wait, this is digital photography! The "darkroom" tools at my disposal are way beyond what was available back in my film days.

So, I digitally combined two of the photos, one that showed the Moon, and another that showed the clouds. Here is the result; you can click on the picture for a larger view:




I performed the above-mentioned photo merging manually, in a photo editor. There is a technology coming of age that will do this kind of thing automatically -- digitally combining multiple exposures, to bring out the detail from all of them. Awhile ago, I performed some experiments with a Photomatix trial version. At the time, it didn't feel ready for prime time due to its poor handling of any image or camera movement whatsoever between the shots -- even one pixel difference was problematic. But the software may have been improved since then. Here is the link, FYI:

http://www.hdrsoft.com/