Stories of life on our farm in Northwest Georgia where every day is an adventure in this beautiful spot that God has entrusted to our stewardship.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Playing in the Cold Winter Moonlight

I was heading to bed about 1:30 a.m. this morning (night owl!) when I looked out the back door and saw the moon peeking through the big oak tree.  I couldn't resist!  So I put the camera on the tripod and set up on the back porch.  Night-time photography is tricky, and auto-focus cameras have a hard time in the dark, but I got several photos that I liked.  Then, of course, I had to play around with them on iPhoto using different editing tricks.  Here are the results:

1)  The first photo I shot, completely un-retouched.

2)  The rest of the photos were taken with the camera in this position.  All I did to this one was crop it a bit to remove the wind chimes.  It, like several of the branches, showed up red.  I finally figured out this was because of the light shining out from the house!  The four red points of light that look like a radio tower at the bottom middle of the photo are just exactly that--a radio tower on Lookout Mountain in the distance.

3)  This is the same view in Black & White mode, with the radio tower removed by retouching.

4)  This is the same view with Fade x 9 and the radio tower removed.

5)  This is the same view with the black point, white point and mid-tones adjusted to 65% to make the branches show up better (and the radio tower removed).  Unfortunately, Blogger decided it needed to enhance this photo, which made the sky lighter than I wanted it and also shows a funny blur where I removed the radio tower.

6)  So I went back to iPhoto and put everything back the way it was except for the radio tower.  This time when Blogger enhanced the photo, it turned out exactly the way I had first made it look on iPhoto!  Aha!  Foiled you, Blogger!

So, which one do you like best?

6 comments:

  1. I Love #4. Love it. Thanks for sharing Susan!-tessa

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    1. You're welcome, Tessa! It definitely has that COLD winter feel I was getting standing on the back porch without a coat! :)

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  2. Decisions, decisions, decisions! I liked #1 for the glow of the moon until I saw #3 with all the little twigs showing so clearly plus the moon glow! Gorgeous photos!
    Barbara

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    1. I can't decide, either, Barbara! Thank you, but really all I did was set the camera up on a tripod and push the shutter release! :)

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  3. Replies
    1. I lean toward that one, too, even though the first one is more what it actually looked like, because the blue evokes how cold it was!

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