This was a 6 shot composite that I did recently. The moonlight provided the ambient exposure for the top of the jetty, but the sides and the crevices were light painted in, and I used a manually triggered speedlite during one of my exposures to get the wave on the left.
Feedback is appreciated.
Was the reason for the composite focus-stacking (I'm guessing so)?
Overall, I think it's a really ambitious photo. Two things niggle:
(i) I think it's cool that you created an asymmetry on either side of the jetty BUT something inside of me is fighting against it. Not because it's asymmetrical (I love getting that into photos) I think it's more that wide angle pics with a dominant central object that stretches to the horizon (or appears to, I appreciate one can see the end of the jetty) use that object to break up symmetry. An obvious example is a field of flowers with a path going down the middle. Obviously this would be a totally different photo but I can imagine turning the camera 45 degrees to the left and making the wave the subject and de-emphasising the jetty (moving the moon to the far opposite corner). Although doing the latter would be tough with a wide angle.
(ii) The lighting is tricky: I totally get why you wanted to light the wave but then there's the moon on the water too. My 2c is that ighting in a nightime photo needs to be traced to a 'valid' source. Therefore the moonlit water is cool. I'm guessing the horizon is a town. But I'm scratching me head regarding the wave.
I love the sky. Imho, when parts of a photo almost look like a painting, the photographer is doing something right. The multiple strokes of different colours are gorgeous.
Obviously it would be great if the moon had been captured more clearly but hey, what can I say, celestial bodies don't always play game with us poor, beaten up nighttime long-exposure photographers :)
Lots to like, I'll be interested so see what comes next!
Thanks for the feedback! I generally agree about the composition: I had done a similar shoot last year on an abandoned road, one centered like this and one from an oblique angle which, in my opinion, was much stronger.
The reason for the compositing: I didn't do any focus stacking here. The ambient moonlight left a lot of deep shadows that I had to light paint in with flashlights. In general, I've found that you get a lot more control over the image as you can take tons of exposures, compare them side by side, and build them up into a final image, and mask out any light spillover you don't like. I was going for a slightly surreal look, hence the wave as well, but probably made the lighting look a bit too even.
Definitely messed up on the moon. I tried to get a properly exposed image of the moon to composite in, but I rushed it and my darkest exposure was still an overexposed blob.
I'm curious what an HDR / bracketing approach would look like, say nine shots, three at +[0.7?] increments and three on the minus side. I've only ever bracketed in the day time but could be interesting. Also, if you want to bypass the layer + masking process there's a nifty freeware command line tool called Enfuse (http://enblend.sourceforge.net/). It doesn't look like it's being developed any more but is pretty effective with a lot of technical options if you want to go in that direction. It's also super fast.
The moon is always difficult unless you're using a strong tele to get crater detail. It's hard to avoid a pure white disc. I managed to do it once but I can't remember how and I've studied the raw file and exif data - but no clue. Will have to keep trying :)
I've never tried using HDR on a long exposure, but I'm also not a fan of HDR in general. I've never been able to use it without that distinctive flat, crunchy look.
I took a look at Enblend, looks like that's more for panorama stitching. The photos I took were all framed the same way, just lit in different places from different direction. The layer masking lets me choose which light to include, and with what intensity. I actually wrote a blog post about how I made this image, which shows the separate images and shows how they're masked, which I think provides a clearer description: https://alexreiffphotography.blogspot.com/2020/08/how-i-made-this-cape-m...
As for the moon, a telephoto lens in good for getting the details. But, the moon is a white object reflecting sunlight, it's a lot brighter that a night scene. It basically requires similar exposure settings to a daytime image. The moon was only about half full that night, so what you're seeing if that the moon is blown out, there's also a big circle of blown out light pollution around it from moonlight bring reflected of the surrounding air. The mistake I made, I kept dialing back my exposure, the blob got smaller and smaller, and then it came out orange. At that point, I assumed I had gone far enough, but had I zoomed in on the image, I would have seen that I was still seeing a ball of light pollution and still exposing too much.