Harvest Moon–September 2012
We’ve had clouds and rain here for the past few days, with very little sunshine. However, the clouds began to thin late this afternoon. Fortunately, this meant we had another spectacular sunset and perfect viewing conditions for tonight’s Harvest Moon.
This photograph was taken shortly after sunset while the moon was still relatively low in the sky. This created a subtle mix of warm and cool tones in the clouds that gradually disappeared as the moon rose farther above the horizon.
I think I failed to truly capture the drama of the clouds which were simultaneously illuminated by the moon and darkened by the night sky. Perhaps I will return to this photo and try to bring a little more of that out, but I did a relatively quick edit so I could share it tonight, on the night of the Harvest Moon itself.
Notes for the technically curious: This photo is actually a careful merger of two images auto-bracketed—one exposed for the moon and the other for the clouds. Actually, because the most I can differentiate the auto-bracketing in my camera is +/- 2 stops, neither one was really exposed perfectly, and I still had to do some minor corrections for exposure post-processing. (And this is a merger of the +2 and the -2 photos, so they’re really 4 stops different from each other!)
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