Spo-rad-ic, Yeah... That works

I went for so long keeping up a daily blog that now that I have been posting a little more sporadic, I find that I am more emotionally connected to the post rather than a task. Maybe it's just my ADD kicking in after the two and a half years of daily posting. (Ziser, I don't know how you do it be please keep on doing.)

Anyhow, the other morning I had to take my son to the airport to catch a flight. We had to leave the house at 5:45 so yes it was still dark. I opened the front door to see the following glowing in the sky.

Well it was close to that. I went down to the studio to bring up the camera and fortunately it was still on the tripod but had the EF 24-105 f/4L IS USM mounted. Ok so it was not the best choice for low light or solar photography but it was there and it was now.

So outside I go and turn the camera on only to be displayed with NO CF CARD. Ugh! I tromp downstairs and gram a card. So in the few minutes it took me to do all that, the moon was not the same but it is what is in the image above.

Dialing the ISO up to 1600 and racking the lens out to the full 105 mm I knew it was not going to be a great zoom as I was shooting on the 5D Mk II which is full frame so no factoring. Two good things though were with the Mk II 1600 was not going to be an issue and with the size of the image I could crop the daylights (maybe moonlights would be more appropriate here) out of the thing and still have a usable image. Actually the image above is cropped down to just under 10% of the original size.

Sliding the noise reduction slider in Lightroom just slightly eliminated the small amount of digital noise in the image. But that just made a nice looking spooky moon. I could do more.

I had not used the grain slider much in Lightroom because I generally am looking for a tack sharp image that is as clean as a whistle. Besides adding grain after you have reduced noise just seams counterintuitive to me. That is until you want to emulate some real filme grain and not digital noise. The moonlit night gets a little spookier. But I could do more.

Using the Hue/Saturation/Luminance sliders were not going to work her to make a global change to the images overall colorcast as it was mostly black and white naturally. So the next option was to add a color via the localized adjustment brush.

You can see the little tick mark where the color picker is set. That is all it took to give this already eery moonlit sky a sense of mystery and age.


Hope you enjoy the new sporadic me. Cya... Doug