A lot people who try to photograph the moon get problems with an overly bright moon, but not enough detail around it. The main problem is when you take a photograph of the moon at night, the moon comes out so bright you cannot see the details in it. It could even be so bright that it looks like the sun. So how do you photograph the moon?

Overexposed moon almost looks like the sun

Well the first thing to look at is exposure. The moon is lit by the same sunlight as the earth is during the day, so the exposure for the moon itself is similar to earth daylight. Let me explain:

When the sun is out on a nice day on earth you might use an exposure of 1/125 sec at f8 at 200 ISO or something similar. Well, when you look at the moon during ‘our’ night you are seeinging the moon during its daytime, so the exposure for the moon during daylight is probably also about  1/125 sec at f8 at 200 ISO or something similar. The problem we have, is that the scene you want to shoot is maybe 1/8 sec at f5.6 at an ISO of 1600 (because it’s night time and dark).

Whatever you do, don’t use an auto exposure setting on your camera as this will give you a totally overexposed image. See our why your camera lies to you post for more details.

So how do you get around that?

Use 2 photographs and put them together in Photoshop. Take one image before the moon has risen (or is out of shot) using the correct exposure for night-time. Take a second photograph of the moon, but use an exposure that is more compatible with shooting a normal daylight scene. I would bracket (take multiple images with varying exposures) to get the perfect moon exposure.

Original scene before adding a photograph of the moon

Photograph the moon with normal daylight exposures

What about an eclipse?

These do need a bit of bracketing as exposures change during the eclipse. This Red Moon Eclipse at the top of this post was shot at 2 seconds at f9 with an ISO of 800. You might just need to experiment.

Putting the photograph of the moon into any scene.

The first thing we’re going to do is to drag the moon photograph into the selected scene in Photoshop. It doesn’t matter where it goes as we can move it later. You can even resize it a bit if you need.

Drag the photograph of the moon onto your scene as a new layer

Now let us change the mode in the layers panel to Screen. Screen hides the darker areas of the layer and only shows the lighter, so your dark black sky now disappears.

Change the photograph of the moon layer to screen mode

Move the photograph of the moon layer to required position

At this point you could just stop as your moon looks great, but what about a subtle moon reflection on the sea?

Putting in the moon reflection

Let’s start with a selection. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just a rough shape of where the reflection might be.

A photograph of the moon needs a reflection to make it believable, so start with a selection

Use the adjustment menu in the bottom of the layers panel to add a levels adjustment. Lighten the area with levels. The selection automatically generates a mask, so only selected area will be affected.

Add a Levels adjustment layer in the layers panel

Drag the middle arrow slider to the left to lighten masked area

Looks a bit rough right? Well now, if you double click the layer mask you will get to the mask options. Choose feather to soften the edge of the ‘reflection’ to taste. Remember subtlety is the key.

Feather will soften your harsh mask edge

Now just dial back the amount of reflection on the sea using the opacity slider on the layers menu.

Reduce the reflection of the moon with the opacity

Eh voilà A perfectly exposed moon as well as a perfectly exposed scene.

I hope you enjoyed this how to photograph the moon tutorial. Whenever I go out on a clear night, I will often photograph the moon as you never know when it will come in handy for a picture. For an idea of what the moon phase will be take a look at the time and date web site.

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As with most of our Cyprus photography, the approach did not fill us with confidence about creating spectacular images however once there it was a different story. Beautiful rocks, a quiet stream and wonderful Cyprus blue sky had us “ooh-ing” and “aah-ing” all afternoon.

How to get there.

To find the gorge take the route out from Paphos about 16km at the start of the Akamas peninsula – it’s along the west coast and you’ll eventually pick up signs for Avakas Gorge. As you are approaching the steep drive down to the nature trail you will see a strange castle looking type building. This is a beautiful restaurant where you eat al fresco whilst being shaded by the vines. and overlooking spectacular surroundings hills and gorge. Great for a panoramic. Just remember to book beforehand. Their chips are amazing and gluten free!

The entrance to the nature trail to get Avakas Gorge is found just around the corner.

Ally photographing Avakas Gorge

Avakas Gorge Black and White

It is a lovely walk in an area that is a nature and wildlife lover’s paradise. Wear good shoes and if you can, take a tripod. The gorge itself is at the end of the trail and at our relatively slow pace I reckon this took about 40 minutes. Of course we were stopping to take photos along the way.

Experiment, experiment, experiment.

The gorge itself is beautiful and depending on the light you can get some stunning images. We both spent a long time experimenting with images (as well as waiting for other tourists to walk past out of the shot).

So what if the rocks don’t have the spectacular golden glow you see in the photographs? Our before and after tutorial will show you how to augment the little you have in the post production process.

Avakas Gorge rock wall

If there are a number of tourists a good trick is to put your camera on a tripod and take various shots of the same scene so that you can layer these images up in Photoshop and mask out the people on different layers until you have a people free image.

The post The amazing Avakas Gorge floating rock – Cyprus photography appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Cyprus has a bit of a reputation as either a party island or a place to lie and soak up the sun but there is so much more to see and photograph. The following are 2 areas on the south west coast near Paphos so grab your camera and battered fedora and come exploring with us.

Cyprus shipwreck at the Sea Caves

On our trip back from Paphos and heading in the general direction of where we had heard about the famous Cyprus shipwreck, we noticed an incredible sunset about to happen. Unfortunately we were still half a mile away from the sea but with lots of hard acceleration and zippy corners we turned around the last bend and there was the shipwreck exactly where we expected. Coming to a screeching halt, I grabbed my camera and jumped out the car whilst Tim found somewhere to leave the car. The sunset here was phenomenal with a very interesting sky, and we both came away very very happy with the pictures we’d made.

Cyprus shipwreck at Sea Caves

I was shooting directly into the sunset and needed to stop down the lens for a reasonable depth of field. I have a pretty steady hand but when I feel the shutter speed is too low I usually find a rock or sturdy tree branch that serves as a makeshift tripod. We bracketed these in case we needed to use multi-exposures. This would allow us to get details in both the sun and cloud highlights as well as in the very dark shadows of the water. We needn’t have worried as we managed to pull detail back using techniques in the RAW file converter. (See how we did it on this picture of the Hyde Park building in the before and after section.)

Tombs of the Kings (but nothing to do with kings)!

This is a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 2 km from Paphos Harbour. Many of the tombs date back to the 4th century BC. It has nothing to do with kings. The name comes purely from the magnificence of the tombs. We went here not far from closing time but were told we’d have enough time to walk around. As it was just a minimal charge of €2.50 we decided to go in. It turns out that if you want to take time to photograph you do need a lot longer! There are a lot of ruins obviously, some more interesting than others. But if you go down underneath some of them there are some amazing images to be made. One in particular, with lots of pillars, with the golden light coming through was beautiful. To create more atmosphere, we kicked up some of the dust so it was hanging in the air.

Tombs of the Kings

To avoid being locked in we rushed our image making. It was late in the day and there were very few other tourists around. We photographed the last few pictures and ran for the gate only to discover that the attendant had already left. It turns out that the turnstile will still allow you out! Excellent photography tip: go late in the day and you can shoot towards sunset when everyone else has left and still get out.

You can’t beat a good Cyprus shipwreck and an old Tomb for some really moody images.

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