August Moon

I have always marveled at photographs of the moon.  Probably partly because I grew up during the space race and watched every scrap of coverage on television, with my parents.  I wondered and dreamed what it would be like to go there, what it would look like up close and truly stared in awe at the grainy, blown out footage from NASA of the lunar landings. Over the years I’ve been a huge fan of astronomical photography of any kind. I figured these guys who took such cool shots of the moon from earth must have a dizzying array of equipment and zoom lenses that were longer than my arm.

Well, no more.  While I am sure there are a million amateur photographs nearly identical to this one out there, this one is mine.  It is my first, I took it today, processed it and I’m happy with the results! It is MY moon…and while it is no where near the best picture of the moon out there, it really doesn’t matter.  The next one will be better and so on, but this is my first.

Camera calibration, some detail sharpening, and basic adjustments in Lightroom.

In Photoshop I tried a new trick I learned where I

–changed the color mode to LAB

–switched to the channels pallete

–selected only the lightness layer

–applied an unsharp mask at 65% with a Radius of 3 and Threshold of 2

–I repeated this again

–then from the Edit menu I selected Fade Unsharp Mask and set that to 50%.

–Then I changed the mode back to RGB

This a Scott Kelby trick and there are various settings depending on the general subject matter, so if you want more information, shoot me a message and I can throw some more settings up for you.

AS ALWAYS even when the image isn’t a VPW candidate, I always want and love hearing feedback!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 11:40 pm. It is filed under Images, Night, Uncategorized and tagged with Marietta, Moon, Outdoors, Sky, Summer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.