Interval-timed composite of moon

[Kevin Childress]

This sort of time-lapse image certainly isn't an original idea but its a project that I've been pre-visualizing and wanting to try for myself. This morning was a very crisp and clear morning so I tried it to see what I could learn. But now that I've got it, I'm not sure what I want to do with it (and that's where you come in).  As for the pre-visualization, there were really only a few things I had decided beforehand. I wanted an odd number of frames in case I decided to selectively edit every other exposure/interval. And I knew the approximate time of day that I wanted to shoot the frames based on my previous notion of when I could get nice, sharp images of the moon. And I figured I wanted approximately 30-40% overlap between each interval.  It took a few sample shots to figure out the travel, but I finally settled on seven 52-second intervals. Looking at the image now, the only thing I might change would be the time of day I shot the project. I thought it would look nice with a dark blue sky, but maybe it would look a little nicer if shot earlier in the morning to get a darker sky ... not sure. 

All 7 frames were shot identically at 420mm (full-frame), f/10, ISO400, 1/800-sec. I didn't realize until I was finished that I still had a 2-stop ND filter on the lens from it's last use - its a very thin filter and I completely overlooked it (hence the ISO400).  :(  I could get a cleaner image at ISO100, so if I can come up with an edit I like here I'll probably re-shoot the project in the future. 

So, I'm looking for ideas of how I might process the image. I suppose it works okay as-is but its not exactly blowing my skirt up. Right now the layer stack is composited by setting the top 6 layers to Lighten blend mode. That works fine but it also allows the darker parts of each moon to remain 'transparent' and allows lighter parts of the underlying moon(s) to shine through. I will most likely mask out the underlying bits to get sharper images of the overlying bits. I don't mind getting a little wild with this but I still want it to remain tasteful. Perhaps I could colorize every other moon. Or if not completely colorize, perhaps overlay a color gradient across every other moon (a gradient that transitions from transparent to a color). Maybe adjusting the transparency of every frame (back-to-front) would be cool?  Any ideas/comments you have would be very helpful! 

The big screenshot below is the as-shot angle of view so clearly I have a lot of room to crop and/or rotate the palette. The small image is the crop I'm considering at the moment but I'm very flexible on crop/rotation. 

[© Tom Cooper]

On Friday, October 30, 2015 at 10:44:31 AM UTC-5, Kevin Childress wrote:

This sort of time-lapse image certainly isn't an original idea but its a project that I've been pre-visualizing and wanting to try for myself. This morning was a very crisp and clear morning so I tried it to see what I could learn. But now that I've got it, I'm not sure what I want to do with it (and that's where you come in).  As for the pre-visualization, there were really only a few things I had decided beforehand. I wanted an odd number of frames in case I decided to selectively edit every other exposure/interval. And I knew the approximate time of day that I wanted to shoot the frames based on my previous notion of when I could get nice, sharp images of the moon. And I figured I wanted approximately 30-40% overlap between each interval.  It took a few sample shots to figure out the travel, but I finally settled on seven 52-second intervals. Looking at the image now, the only thing I might change would be the time of day I shot the project. I thought it would look nice with a dark blue sky, but maybe it would look a little nicer if shot earlier in the morning to get a darker sky ... not sure. 

All 7 frames were shot identically at 420mm (full-frame), f/10, ISO400, 1/800-sec. I didn't realize until I was finished that I still had a 2-stop ND filter on the lens from it's last use - its a very thin filter and I completely overlooked it (hence the ISO400).  :(  I could get a cleaner image at ISO100, so if I can come up with an edit I like here I'll probably re-shoot the project in the future. 

 

You mention shooting earlier to get a darker sky.   Instead, substitute a CPL for the 2-stop ND.  You gain soem light, and at the same time darken the sky in relation to the moon.  Trivia:  At first quarter and last quarter, the moon is very close to 90° from the sun, which puts it in the spot that polarizers work best.

 

So, I'm looking for ideas of how I might process the image. I suppose it works okay as-is but its not exactly blowing my skirt up. Right now the layer stack is composited by setting the top 6 layers to Lighten blend mode. That works fine but it also allows the darker parts of each moon to remain 'transparent' and allows lighter parts of the underlying moon(s) to shine through. I will most likely mask out the underlying bits to get sharper images of the overlying bits. I don't mind getting a little wild with this but I still want it to remain tasteful. Perhaps I could colorize every other moon. Or if not completely colorize, perhaps overlay a color gradient across every other moon (a gradient that transitions from transparent to a color). Maybe adjusting the transparency of every frame (back-to-front) would be cool?  Any ideas/comments you have would be very helpful! 

 

If you are going to overlap the moon's disk, then I would mask the sky instead of using "Lighten Blend".  This could get tricky near the terminator (where shadow meets sunlight), but the way you have them stacked here, you only need to get that right for the top image.

 

If you are willing to go 1970's weird, try using levels to set the color of each image to a different point in the spectrum. So the bottom layer image would be red, next would be orange, next yellow, etc. finfishing with the top image being white.

[Kevin Childress]

© Tom Cooper wrote:

 

You mention shooting earlier to get a darker sky.   Instead, substitute a CPL for the 2-stop ND.  You gain soem light, and at the same time darken the sky in relation to the moon.  Trivia:  At first quarter and last quarter, the moon is very close to 90° from the sun, which puts it in the spot that polarizers work best.

 

If you are going to overlap the moon's disk, then I would mask the sky instead of using "Lighten Blend". 

 

If you are willing to go 1970's weird, try using levels to set the color of each image to a different point in the spectrum. So the bottom layer image would be red, next would be orange, next yellow, etc. finfishing with the top image being white.

Tom,   That's a good idea on the first and last quarter with the CP filter. The filter was a mistake altogether but I do like this idea.  It only took a couple minutes to get the overlapped transparency thing worked out. I set a brush to the same diameter of the moon and just stamped out the overlapped parts on each layer - it took all of five minutes. About the colorization, or whatever we call it:  I finally realized that what I'd like to see are those orange-ish colors like we see with lunar eclipses. I played around with it for bit and it should be doable, and like you suggested, fading to white on the forward-most layer. I need to sleep on that for a few days to get it right ...

[™Ken Kruse™]

Perhaps try it with some foreground interest. You would probably need to make an additional exposure for the foreground but that doesn't seem like much considering. For that matter I suppose you could try it with a an exposure from a completely different scene to see how it works.

[Kevin Childress]

™Ken Kruse™ wrote:

Perhaps try it with some foreground interest.

Now there's a thought. Maybe do the same thing with the moon sliding down behind a silhouette of trees in the foreground. That should be easy enough.  

[© Tom Cooper]

Until you discover that the trees move.

[Kevin Childress]

© Tom Cooper wrote:

Until you discover that the trees move.

 

Yeah, true that.  

[Kevin Childress]

I forfeit.  Nothing I've tried for adding color(s) looks right to me, although fading the opacity of each moon disk back-to-front has a certain appeal to it. Here's the final version - not all that different from the first one I posted except the overlapping parts of each disk is now nice and crisp and a bit more contrast for the darker sky. 

[df3vi]

I am just wandering, would the composed image look any different at all if you had taken only one shot, and then duplicate that shifted 85 pixels to the right and 50 pixels down six times?
Without any foreground such an image looks rather pointless to me.

[Kevin Childress]

df3vi wrote:

I am just wandering, would the composed image look any different at all if you had taken only one shot, and then duplicate that shifted 85 pixels to the right and 50 pixels down six times?
Without any foreground such an image looks rather pointless to me.

df3vi,  There was no particular point in capturing the image except for what I mentioned in my OP: 1) to use the camera's intervalometer to capture the moon for an odd-numbered set of repetitive photographs, and 2) hoping that I could later selectively process the image into something 'different'. And as I said, part 2 just didn't work to my liking, so it is what it is. To answer your first question: No. The intervalometer wasn't required to create the image; I could have done exactly what you suggested for duplicating the moon but I enjoy the camera work so the intervalometer was the route I chose.