This is an idea I have stolen. I have seen this before, and it has been done much better than mine. However, mine is made from todays actual shots of birds and moon.
Nice photo. Care to reveal your processing?
The processing wasn't complicated, actually. I took the moon picture and enlarged it. I cut out the birds from the other picture (it helped opening the raw file with 4.00 over-exposure to get the sky white; the birds where black shapes anyway). I added the birds as a new layer to the moon.
Now I had a moon on a black backdrop with the birds visible against the moon. The birds outside the moon were invisible. I had to create a halo. For this I created a new layer with just the moon in it (cut out) on top of the moon layer. Duplicated the "moon with backdrop" layer and applied to each of them a different amount of Gaussian. Reduced the visibility. Put a pure black layer underneath. Hey presto!
The main achievement in this case was, for me, that I found out how to make pictures of the moon. After my first tries with ISO 1600 and aperture priority I was disappointed: The moon was a white spot in the middle of a black backdrop, some pictures even with camera shake. But when I set the exposure bias to -5 (heavy underexposure/ very dark picture) I could drop the ISO to 400 and still shoot with a 1/1000 at f5.6 with 210mm. And the moon had details!
Of course, I used matrix metering (don't know if that's the proper English term actually) where the whole picture is taken into account. Maybe I should have switched to spot metering instead of using exposure bias. This will be my next try when we have a cloudless sky again. However I realised that the moon is indeed a bright object and I know now how to shoot it with my long zoom lens without tripod.
Very impressive. I've never seen a moon photo better. Bravo!
--Don
Thanks Don!
Edit: Shuttertalk really is on the edge of technology - time travel is possible, finally!
Great photo Guerito!
I've had several goes at taking moon photos but was disappointed with the results. Like you, I tried underexposing, and spot metering as well....
Maybe I need a camera with better resolution.
By the way, I love the effect, but if you scrutinize the pic, I think you can see jaggies around the moon...