Back to Photography: In the Glow of the Night

Now that I’ve finished the website changes, I’m going back through my images from last year and processing some of the ones I’ve left dormant. This image taken from the tundra at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado was an image that I worked on a couple of months ago. This is a composite of two images. In order to get detail in the foreground I needed a fairly long exposure as this was taken about 45 minutes after sunset. The moon, however, was blurred in that image as it moved across the sky. Without moving my camera, I captured a second image with a faster shutter speed in order to get the moon sharp. I then took the sharp image of the moon and added it back into the image with the foreground.

An interesting note about capturing the moon at night: Since the moon reflects the light of the sun, the camera settings – aperture and shutter are close to what they would be when photographing any other landscape item in the day (which would also be reflecting the light of the sun).

Technical Details:
2 Images – Canon 5D Mark II, 300 f/4L + 1.4 TC, f/8
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado