I just got in from 3 hours of photographing the sunset and the rising moon. What a beautiful night! I'm sure by now that everyone has heard today is the "blue moon", or the second full moon of the month. Technically the full moon occurred at 5:42 this morning, but tonight it still looks full to the naked eye.
This photo is edited a little more heavily than I typically like to do with my photos, but I wanted to play around with this shot and see just how well I could push the capabilities of the sensor in the Nikon D750. This camera is simply amazing. The amount of detail that remains in the shadows is astonishing. As long as you can shoot at a reasonably low ISO, you can pull incredible amounts of detail from the shadows. With my old Canon 5D Mark II there's no way I could have processed this photo the same way. Well, I could have, but the results would have been messy. Lightening the photo as much as I did would have turned it into a noisy/grainy mess.
So, just for fun, I've included the edited shot and the unedited shot for comparison. The photo was processed in Adobe Lightroom CC. I photographed the moon with my Tamron 150-600mm lens at 600mm. I cropped the photo to make the moon larger, then made some tweaks to the various sliders in Lightroom. Here are my edits:
Exposure: +3.00
Highlights: -73
Shadows: +75
Whites: +15
Clarity: +30
Vibrance: +25
Sharpening: 75
Noise Reduction - Luminance: 25
I also adjusted the white balance temp slider to 4,500 which is a little "cooler" than the result that auto white balance gave me. The photo was made as the moon was not too far above the horizon, so it was still pretty orange from all the atmospheric interference. There was also a thin layer of clouds which made a hazy effect around the moon. Overall the edited image has a pretty surreal feel to it, but I do like it. No fancy blending of multiple images here, just careful processing of a single RAW file from the Nikon D750, which I'm loving more and more each time I shoot with it :-)
The unedited image is below:
We sure have had a lot of clouds that look like this over the past couple of weeks. You would think for sure that a big storm was coming, but most of these storms have passed us by. Such was the case with this particular formation, which entertained us for most of our drive back from Duluth just over a week ago. We watched this fascinating bank of clouds on the horizon directly ahead of us for at least an hour and a half on our drive, and it barely got any closer as we drove. It must have been tracking up the shore at about the same speed as we were driving. We thought for sure that we would eventually catch up to it and be driving through some rain, but that never happened. I stopped just north of Tofte, MN and made this picture from the side of the road with my Tamron 150-600 lens.
We sure have had a lot of fog this year. I don't know if it has actually been more than normal, but it seems like it has been. Last week while driving to work Pete's Island in Grand Portage Bay looked really mysterious as it tried to show itself from behind the fog. I loved the combination of the island, fog, clouds and blue sky. I simply could not resist stopping and taking a picture of the scene!
A quiet summer day on a small lake in northeast Minnesota. It sure is nice when you can have a lake all to yourself :-)
Last week after we picked strawberries at Belluz Farms we stopped along the edge of this beautiful canola field just outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario. It's funny... we go to Thunder Bay quite frequently throughout the year and I don't remember ever seeing these vibrant yellow fields before. I'm sure this isn't the first year they've been like this, so it's probably just a case of me never driving by when they've been in bloom before. In any case, we were shocked by the huge fields of yellow and how beautiful they were. Definitely not something you see in northeast Minnesota :-)
Here is another photo of last night's sunset, this one taken from the road in front of our house. The colors and shapes within the clouds were unreal. One of the best sunsets of the summer, that's for sure!
It was a bit of a surreal sunset last night! Rarely do we see sunsets that light up the entire sky with color, but last night was one of those rare times when exactly that happens. There were clouds all over in every direction of the sky and every one of them was lit up with some amazing color. We were just getting ready to start watching a movie when I looked out our dining room window and noticed the sky colors getting really intense. At first I walked around our yard snapping pictures of the clouds but I couldn't get enough of the sky in my shots to catch all the color. So, I hopped in the car and drove over to Hat Point Marina where there is a more open view. By the time I got over there the most intense color had faded but the afterglow was beautiful too. That was when the surreal part kicked in. The color tone had changed enough in the afterglow that I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I've seen colors like this before but rarely so prominently throughout the sky. I decided to frame a shot of the sunset with the ferries of the Grand Portage - Isle Royale Transportation Line in the foreground.
The Grand Portage - Isle Royale Transportation Line provides passenger service from Grand Portage, MN to Isle Royale National Park in Michigan. They run two ferries, the Sea Hunter III (pictured on the left) which runs day trips to Windigo, and the Voyageur II (on the right) which circles the entire island and makes stops at various points along the way. The Voyageur II spends the night at Rock Harbor, making the round-trip of Isle Royale a two-day affair. If you'd like to find out more information about making a trip to Isle Royale via one of these ferries, you can check out Grand Portage - Isle Royale Transportation Line's website at http://www.isleroyaleboats.com.
