This is as close as I can get to showing you what the full moon looked like to me last night, with an orange tinged glow surrounding it. The image includes some tree branches on the right side of the photo in a mostly futile effort effort to frame the moonlit sky.
Last night I posted a photo that showed the moon and the clouds, but I wasn’t satisfied that it represented really well what my eyes had seen. So I went over the images again that I shot and came across this one. It required a bit of tweaking in Photoshop Elements to tone down the really bright light of the moon, but I had managed to capture some of the details of both the moon and the clouds.
I shot quite a few photos as I searched for a combination of f-stop and shutter speed that would capture the moment. This one was shot at f20 with a shutter speed of .8 seconds and was overexposed. Some of the other shots with faster shutter speeds rendered the moon well, but the sky was black and no amount of tweaking could bring out the clouds. Longer exposures, on the other hand, resulted in beautiful clouds, but the moon was a perfect circle that was pure white and, again, I couldn’t tweak the settings to get details.
As I was shooting, the light kept changing as the moon moved in and out of the clouds, which complicated my efforts. Learning from my previous efforts to shoot in the dark, though, I had a small flashlight with me to assist me as I repeatedly changed the settings on my camera.
I’m a little more content with this photo than the other one that I posted of the full moon but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be outside again this evening experimenting further with capturing this tricky subject.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
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