Moonlight Shadows

I visited this arch with Eric Gail during my trip to the US Southwest in June 2018. We arrived during twilight and had to wait for the moon to set and the sky to become fully dark.

 

I captured some foreground and tracked sky exposures while the moon was still low in the sky, but as I liked the results from our setup after moonset, I never processed the earlier shots. Recently, I went through some of my shots from that trip and noticed that this was a mistake...

 

I have ambivalent feelings towards moonlit foregrounds, as they look a bit like sunset shots, which seems odd with dark skies above. Of course, the image looks more natural if you shoot the sky as well while the moon is up. Unfortunalely, this means that the better foreground contrasts have to be payed with washed out sky detail.

 

Somehow I found that this was not the case here. I am not sure why, maybe it was the absence of light pollution or the excellent transparency due to the low humidity in the desert. Whatever the reason was, it enabled me to get more detail out of a moonlit sky than I ever thought possible.

 

Prints available: ralf-rohner.pixels.com

 

EXIF

Canon EOS 6D astro-modified

Samyang 24mm f/1.4 @ f/2

iOptron SkyTracker Pro

Sky:

6 x 60s @ ISO1600, tracked

Foreground:

6 x 60s @ ISO1600

Done