Mono Moonrise. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Autumn full moon rises over Mono Lake, California.
The scene is an autumn moonrise over Mono Lake, a scene that I often encounter on my fall photographic visits to the Eastern Sierra. I’m there often enough that it seems like I have this opportunity almost every year. I had been photographing more typical autumn subjects earlier in the day — largely the fall colors of aspen trees — but I decided to finish that activity early enough to get myself to a likely location to see and photograph the moonrise over the lake. These days, with the help of various digital tools, we can come very close to putting ourselves in precisely the right spot at precisely the right time. On this evening the moon rose in early twilight, but I continued photographing until it became quite dark.
On a technical note, there are some challenges to including the full moon in a photograph made after dark. The biggest issue is that the moon is a lot brighter than the landscape — the landscape is in darkness but it is essentially noon on the moon! There are ways to deal with this, one of which is to photograph before the landscape becomes completely dark, and I did that here. But I was pushing that boundary a bit, and I was initially unable to get the balance between the moon and the dark landscape that I was looking for. However, as sometimes happens, the sophistication of post-processing software advanced, most notably with the introduction of some powerful new selection tools in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW. (Despite the popularity of Lightroom, I’m still a Bridge/ACR/Photoshop user.) These tools enabled me to make some important adjustments to the dark portions of this image while retaining detail in the moon. (NOTE: This is a re-working of a photograph that I had previously shared back in 2019.)
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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“Higher quality” could mean at least two things — better aesthetic or technical quality!
I hope it is both.
Over time I have increased the sizes of the images I share online. Back when lower resolution was typical the only photographs were only about half as wide as what I post these days, and that makes a difference in several ways. I’ve also gradually changed the way I sharpen photographs for online sharing. (This is done differently that what printing entails.)
As to aesthetic changes… I think/hope it is inevitable that what and how I create and see changes over time. Every photograph teaches me something new about how I see and about how to express that photographically.
Dan
Thank you lol! I really like the ‘related photos’ bar underneath the main photo. I’ve used it often to see stuff from before I followed you! it looks like you’re posting higher quality images over the years?
Well, there have been a LOT of photographs posted since then… so you are forgiven! :-)
Dan
You rose to the challenge! This is a fantastic moon photo! Love the moon wake. I’m just trying to figure out how I miss seeing it in 2019! Pretty sure I started following your page in 2018.