Halo
by
MousieComment by Mousie: I've gotten a couple requests to describe how I made this picture, so here goes!
The subject itself is the moon, of course, and a tree in the parking lot right outside of my office. The tree was dimly lit by a single sodium lamp to it's left, slightly to the rear, with just enough light to catch some good detail using a long exposure. I set up my tripod very close to the gound and framed my shot at about a 45 degree angle upwards, paying careful attention to where the moon whould shine through the branches. This was tricky using my tiny little LCD, I may have snapped a shot and zoomed in on it to get more detail to see if it looked good where it was, I don't really remember but I'll do that sort of thing pretty frequently. I almost always use exposure bracketing of +/- 2/3 and an exposure compensation of -2/3, I find that I get better results if I force the camera to take a couple darker exposures than it would normally choose, these settings give me three images, one at normal exposure, one at -2/3, and one at -1 1/3. This time I chose not to and did everything manually so I could have more control over the result. I set my aperture to 6 so I 'd have a reasonable depth of field (to keep both the tree and moon in focus) and so I could use a relatively slow shutter speed, I wanted the thin clouds in front of the moon to have a chance to move and get that soft, slightly streaked look. Using the in-camera metering, I adjusted my shutter speed until the exposure read -2/3 stop when I half-pressed the shutter release. It was about right at 8 seconds. I took a picture, checked if I liked it (which I did) and just to be safe, shot a picture at 10 seconds, and at 6 seconds to manually bracket the shot. I may have shot a few more at different shutter speeds, you can't go wrong taking extra shots!
Once I got home, I went through the pictures and looked for the one that had the best moon. The moon is just a little blown out in the one I finally decided on, but I used it because the halo of clouds was exposed just right, it had good detail and color. I then cropped the image to get a nice balance of tree to sky.
Using the levels adjustment, I darkened the blacks considerably to get the sky really dark, basically dropping everything ouside of the halo to black. As it was shot you could actually see the shadow side of the branches against the slightly lighter clouds in the sky, but I didn't like that so I got rid of it to make the scene more dramatic. Once I had the blacks where I wanted them, I increased the brightness of the mid-tones to make the branches and halo pop. I usually go back and forth a bit at this point, tweaking the blacks, mid-tones, and whites, since they're all interrelated. I'll pump the mid-tones and darken the blacks for more contrast, or ease-off on the blacks and darken the mid-tones for a little less contrast... I spend 5-10 minutes doing this on every picture I process! This time I avoided touching the whites at all, since it would have only blown out the moon even more than it already was.
Once the levels were where I wanted them I sharpened the full size version, saved it off, undid the sharpening, scaled it to 640X480, sharpened it at the new size, and saved the version I submitted... almost.
The next day I went back to look at the pictures I'd shot the night before, decided that the sky was still a bit light for my tastes, and started from scratch, trying more contrasty levels settings. After the same process I finally had the one I was happy with.
And that is how I made Halo!
