Stepped out at dusk last night, then stepped back in to get the camera and shoot a couple of frames.
Well, it was more than a couple, because I was both focusing manually and freehanding the long lens, trying for an exposure that would bright out the branches against the last light in the sky; I have a lot of discards. It would have been better about ten minutes earlier, though I hadn’t spotted it then. You can see that the moon is overexposed here, just barely retaining some of the surface detail, but I think it carries the idea well enough.
And another version, different exposure and framing.
Slightly better exposure on the moon, but I actually had to lighten the sky a tad to keep the branches from being too subtle. This actually was a very specific adjustment to the Curves in GIMP, my editing program:
The menu on the right shows a histogram of the light levels in the image, the underlying grey peaks all clustered towards the left side – this indicates that the image is almost entirely dark, and while the moon looks quite bright in contrast to the dark sky, it’s closer to the register of the background color of the blog, plus it takes up very little of the frame. I wasn’t after that, though, but brightening the sky color, and I didn’t want the moon to get any brighter as well. So I clicked a pointer onto the adjustment curve, that diagonal white line across the histogram, right at the outside of the histogram peaks, in effect blocking off everything brighter than those. They I added a second pointer below that, in the middle of the peaks, and brought that up slightly; this brightened the sky while leaving both the moon and the darkest tones, the branches, alone. And of course I cropped it into a vertical.
I’ve often said that full moons are boring, but they can work with other factors in the frame, like the branches here, and anyway the moon isn’t exactly full – look at the bottom edge. Still, it’s more full than it was three days previously, when I did a more direct exposure:
I’d noticed that the contrast seemed especially distinct that night and fired off a few frames then too, with this being the sharpest. I never trust autofocus for moon shots, because it’s often not precise enough, and will take several frames with tiny adjustments to the focus ring to get one tack-sharp.
But yeah, it’s the moon – wow.