Sunday, October 16, 2005

Full moon at dusk

Here's a photo I took earlier this evening that actually combines two different shots into one, and is a good example of how the camera sees things differently than the human eye. The moon is tricky to shoot, because although it doesn't cast lots of light, it's really just reflected sunlight, so to get the detail from the craters, you need a pretty fast shutter speed. However, the evening sky isn't nearly as bright, so if you shoot a high shutter speed, the sky simply turns dark. I took the same photo twice, exposing once for the sky colors and a second with a faster shutter speed to get the moon detail, then used Photoshop to paste the "good" moon into the photo with the "good" sky. The end result is how the eye perceived the moon shining brightly during the sunset.

2 comments:

Rick Lee said...

I have often tried to explain this phenomenon to people by telling them that it's daylight on the moon. This confuses the heck out of people.

stacey abshire said...

I have always tried to get good moon shots... I'll have to try the fast shutter speed, and see what I get. Thanks for the tip, and a nice job on the combination shot here.

This morning, the moon was as bright as ever. Kinda cool to see it that way in a bright sky.