Harvest Moon

In my previous post I alluded to taking some shots of the super harvest moon that we got last week, so I thought I’d better share one of my images before everyone forgets about the occasion. I’ll be honest, and tell you that I wasn’t terribly impressed with the whole harvest moon thing. I guess I was expecting to see a giant moon rising over the horizon, and although the moon was full, and appeared quite large and bright, it wasn’t quite as epic as I was expecting. Despite the bit of disappointment I was feeling, I still convinced myself to rattle off a few brackets to see what I could come up with.

Unfortunately, the disappointment didn’t end with the harvest moon itself. After unloading my images and sifting through them, I found that I wasn’t particularly impressed with any of the shots I got of the harvest moon. I ran a couple sets of brackets through Photomatix and was still not very happy with the results…so, what to do? I knew I wanted to post a harvest moon shot, and now it was almost like a challenge to make at least one of them work. Maybe not the best exercise, but it forced me to get the creative juices flowing a little bit. I decided to throw a texture onto a single exposure (-2 ev) to add a bit of extra interest. After a few other local adjustments and a global saturation shift, I ended up with what you see below…and I’m actually quite pleased with how it all turned out in the end. Moral of the story? Not really sure…be persistent? Stubbornness sometimes pays off? You be the judge 🙂