I've run out of clever titles for blog posts about moon photos. Maybe I should just number them? 

Enough of that, let's get down to business.

Read more »

Last night's full moon was a supermoon, 14% bigger and 30% brighter than an average full moon. Sadly for me, the cloud cover in the Puget Sound Convergence Zone cleared so late that the moon was already high above the horizon, so while I could see that the moon was, indeed, bright, I lacked a good frame of reference for it's size.

I still took some photos, mostly just so I could say I did but...they're nothing out of the ordinary.

I used the same settings I had used on my previous moon photos. I didn't think about it at the time, but I probably should have made some adjustments to accommodate the extra brightness of the supermoon.

Read more »

I went back to the drawing board in GIMP to try to improve my results on the moon photo I wrote about here and here is the result.

I used the same layers as in the previous post but this time, instead of adjusting the transparency of the entire top layer, I added an alpha channel, selected the black sky and made just the sky transparent.

If you look closely, there are still a few issues I need to work through, the main one being I need practice making accurate selections. I'm sure there's some kind of easy way to do this but I don't know what it is yet. As a result, the outer edge of my moon is kind of funky looking, but it's good to know I'm moving in the right direction. I think.

Read more »

Hah! Made you look!

Western Hemlock silhouetted against the moon.

The next two photographs are two different versions of the same shot. The top one was save as a jpeg by the camera. The bottom was converted to a jpeg from the camera's RAW format. It's interesting to note that for this shot, the RAW file produced a much darker image than the jpeg, but for this one, the RAW image is much lighter.

Read more »

I've been working on getting an interesting shot of the moon for weeks. Seeing as we're in the middle of the rainy season in the Pacific Northwest, this is no small feat, but tonight I finally have something to share.

Here is my final image.

I wish I could say I just pointed my camera at the sky and used some mad camera skillz to get this shot but, sadly, that's not exactly what happened.

This is my original shot. The shutter speed on this was 1/50 second. It's not bad, but the moon lacks detail and the trees don't stand out from the sky.

I opened my original in Picasa and cranked up the brightness to make the trees pop. Then I opened it in GIMP.

Then I opened this in GIMP as a layer. This is the same shot as my original, but from the RAW file. As you can see, it's much darker than the jpeg. Then I set the opacity of the layer to around 35%...transparent enough to see the silhouetted trees in the base layer, but opaque enough to add some detail to the moon.

Then I flattened the image and voila! There you have it!

This was the easiest and fastest way I could think of to get an acceptable result, given that it was the first time I've used the software. I need to keep working on it so I can have more definition on the moon and more contrast between the branches and the sky.

Read more »