(Well, actually, "Olympic Moon," but, since we're having fun with a certain photograph/composite/whatever that will undoubtedly make many thousands of times more dollars than I'll ever get with this one, the Latinizing seemed appropriate. )
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a366/regnaDkciN/Contests/A%20Shot%20in%20the%20Dark%202009/20080718_0027.jpg
I don't think that I can provide too much of a dramatic story, except that a) it was the morning of my 52nd birthday, and b) I originally set out to shoot the sunrise, and probably broke every speed record driving from Port Angeles up to Hurricane Ridge in the dark when I realized that I had a chance of getting up there while the moon was still up. Nothing dramatic about the taking of the photo, either -- I just set up on the sidewalk by the visitor's center, with the longest lens I had.
At any rate, this is pretty much what a single-shot moon-and-horizon capture will look like, with my having been lucky to nail the exposure close enough so that some playing with the exposure slider in Lightroom revealed a smidgen of detail of the moon's surface, while still allowing the snowy peaks of the Olympics sufficient shadow detail and texture. If I were shooting this today, I'd bracket several exposures and use blending to make the moon a bit less bright and show a lot more of its surface, but I hadn't yet used that approach at the time this image was made.
You almost made it with this shot... I think this is a shot that is a great opportunity to work on your blending. If the moon was just a bit more underexposed, maybe only a stop more to show more detail, this would be really super! The rest of the shot is good, so practice a bit with blending... it will be worth it.
I was originally going to comment that the problem with "working on my blending" was that, as I mentioned above, this was before I started doing exposure blending, so I really didn't have any bracketed exposures to blend, although I'd make a point of shooting for exposure blends in the future, etc., etc.
But...I went back and looked over my files from that day and found that, lo and behold, I did have a second shot from a few moments later that had about 2/3 of a stop less exposure. By reprocessing it a bit, I was able to bring more detail out of the moon -- not as much as if I'd intentionally shot to blend, but certainly better than in this shot. Since the moon had shifted position relative to the mountains even in so brief a time, however, I couldn't really "blend," but had to do a full compositing job to replace the original moon in this shot with the new one. Does that mean I should come up with a fanciful account of how it was all done in-camera (at one of the hardest places in the world to reach, of course)?
)
