A Long and Difficult Recovery

…or This Image is Full of Surprises

As I was writing a post for my social blog, The Giant Muh, I needed some images. I scrolled through the folder of stuff from our October anniversary trip with my wife Abby, The Endless Sky, and found an image I thought would be worthless because I overexposed it…

As you can see, the brightness value for the moon is off the chart. My hope when shooting it was to achieve a better balance between the bright moon and the cliffs as the predawn sky started to illuminate them.

When I shot it, I was disappointed, but I kept the frame in-camera and continued my Canyonlands hike with longtime friend Scott Andersen. As the light matured and the day went on, we made many successful images, and had a great time.

Scott's image from that moment, made from a slightly lower angle, was a success. — Scott’s image from that moment, made from a slightly lower angle, was a success.

I didn’t give the image much more thought.

Today when I saw the image, I attempted to get some detail out of the moon using Adobe Photoshop’s recovery slider, without much effect.

Then I rather whimsically thought, “I’ll run it through my Nik Collection’s single image tone mapping high dynamic range (HDR) filter (which is free – read more here [link]) and see what happens.”

Honestly, I didn’t think there was much detail in the image – the blacks looked black and the moon looked white. I was amazed, then, when the Nik filter was able to extract a very interesting and detailed image…

I'm not claiming that this is the definitive way to shoot the moon in predawn light. What this image illustrates is that there is often much more in our digital image files, particularly in RAW files, than we might initially think. — I’m not claiming that this is the definitive way to shoot the moon in predawn light. What this image illustrates is that there is often much more in our digital image files, particularly in RAW files, than we might initially think.