Taken on the butte just below Griffith Observatory, overlooking the city and downtown, thinking the moon would rise near downtown and give me a blue ribbon shot. It rose nowhere near downtown. In fact, nowhere near anything picturesque. I DID capture a decent shot of the moon, and also a really nice cityscape. Then on the way home, we came across these two trees. My sweetie was kind enough to light up the lower trunk with his flashlight (which I later had to dodge because it was too distracting, LOL!)
Although the moon WAS in between the trees, it was very teensy weensy. There was also a huge bush on the right which blocked out most of the right trunk and branches. Since it was almost identical to the left branch, I cloned and flipped it and used it as the right trunk and branches (and it turned out just as I imagined).
It was still missing something, so I added flood filter to get the reflections, which included the moon. After a bunch of banter and some editing corrections at the suggestion of an entire team of consultants, I removed the moon reflection (but left a bit of glow), and ended with the current edit.
Shot at about 1250 ISO, it needed significant noise reduction as well as all the typical adjustments
convert from raw
denoise
selected, copied, and inverted left trunk
topazed
sharpened
color balance
curves
levels
flood filter
contrast and brightness
tiny bit of dodging and cloning
save for web
Thanks to a WHOLE BUNCH of people for helping me choose.
Cityscape version outtake:
[Mar. 21st, 2011 12:13:13 AM]
I always post the first impressions because they're so beautiful.
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Hopefully, one day they will stick :-)
[Mar. 21st, 2011 07:58:19 PM]
So of course, I couldn't leave well enough alone and fiddled some more with the image. I think this might have done even better than the one I submitted, but I'll never know:
[thumb]941973[/thumb]
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Beautiful Blues. I like the effect of the intensified contrast of the moon's lights vs darks. The tree and the waves in the water really make this shot pop.
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