[guerito]

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.

[slejhamer]

Nice work!

[Petographer]

Nice photo. Care to reveal your processing?

[guerito]

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.

[Don Schaeffer]

Very impressive. I've never seen a moon photo better. Bravo!
--Don

[guerito]

Thanks Don!

Edit: Shuttertalk really is on the edge of technology - time travel is possible, finally!

[shuttertalk]

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...