How to Get Detail in the Moon

If you have a big, beautiful full moon over your landscape (lucky you), you’re probably going to be really disappointed when you open your shot on your computer later only to find out that there’s no detail in the moon at all. It’s just a big white ball of light, kind of like a darker version of the sun. So how do you get a properly exposed shot of your landscape, and keep the detail in the moon? You take two shots: one exposed for the landscape, and then you change your settings (darkening your exposure by quite a bit) to expose for the moon, and then in Photoshop, in about 30 seconds, you put these two together into one image (it’s so easy—see page 175 in the Post-Processing chapter). Now, you could simply try turning on your camera’s exposure bracketing feature and set it to take a normal shot, one that’s two stops darker (that’s the one you’ll use for the moon), and one that’s two stops brighter (you’ll probably throw that one away). But, since you just shot a bracketed exposure, couldn’t you just combine them into an HDR to get the best of both worlds? Well, you can try, but I don’t think you’ll like the results nearly as much as doing the simple technique on page 175.