PotW #4, night time.

Shooting at night is a real challenge. On top of that, my favorite subject at night, the moon, is much, much brighter than everything else. It's kind of like wanting to take a photo of the sun. Both require specialized equipment to do it all in one shot, so you have to end up doing what I do to cheat.



There were some beautiful clouds rolling by the moon last night, so I took several pictures at a speed that captured the clouds, until I got a set I liked.  I then took a picture much faster, to capture the craters and shadows on the moon, which is waning gibbous in this picture. The watermark on my gallery site really blows the clouds out of the water, but you can get a good idea of how it looks.

Here is the final composite of clouds and moon together. With some careful blending I manage to get the moon not to look blown out at the edges, while still getting the illuminated clouds. 

This shoot was very impromptu, and I ended up getting shots I liked using my car to steady my shooting, instead of getting a tripod.  Whenever possible I prefer to use hand-held shooting, for the added speed and fine control over framing. I guess that means that I need to get myself a nicer tripod to get the framing control back, while upping my stability.  This PotW is technically a day late, and is #5, but for simplicity I am posting what I intended for last week tomorrow.  It didn't go up last week because I didn't bring my camera with me when I took my new car on it's shake-down (stupid), and because my car got all dusty on it's shake-down (of course.) After I get it washed tomorrow I will do a shoot of it and be back on track for number of posts. 

In the meantime, post responses to my photograph, or share your own night time or lunar photography in the comments section below.  Like my page on Facebook to keep up to date on what I'm doing.