More tips for moon and scenery photographing

If you have read my previous post about moon photographing you already know the basics at least. But photographing the moon with scenery can be tricky. Let's say there is a night time scenery like sea and the moon light casts nice lit path on the waves. Very romantic you know.

First you take a photo so that the sea is more or less correctly exposed. Because it is pretty dark, you have to use long exposure. Naturally this is not an issue because you have brought your tripod. When you check your shots, you will notice that the moon is badly overexposed.



Unfortunately most of the digital cameras have rather limited dynamic range compared to your eyes. This means that you cannot get both the sea and the moon correctly exposed. But you can always cheat a little bit and take two different shots. I used the image above for the sea and then I took another photo of the moon with my telephoto lens. With these two images it was simple to copy the correctly exposed moon over the overexposed one.



As you see, I also moved the moon down and made it bigger compared to the original. How good that looks is matter of taste but at least the moon is not overexposed anymore. Sometimes you have to manipulate your shots a bit and I think it is fine as long as you are not working as a photojournalist.