Who's its rocker - me or the moon?

The sky | 2AM. If there's more to it then that, I'm too tired to know | Jesse

[Mr. K]

all i ever get is a white overexposed circle of the moon and black everywhere else.

[sig226]

What settings did you use? Film or digital?

[mrjesse]

Mr. K,

Yes, since the moon is about "a million times" brighter then the light comining off of the ground on a moonlit night, and since cameras have a certain dynamic range, it is not possible to get detail on the moon and on the ground at the same time in a single shot without artificial lighting on the ground.
If the ground is well exposed, the moon will be one great washed out spot.

So yes, you could take two photos - one exposed for the moon and one exposed for the ground, and then merge them.

See how I covered the moon with my hands for most of the exposure:

Moonlit Photos (See sixth picture)

If your camera supports a raw mode that supports 12 or 14 bits per color, you can also change the response curve on the photo to bring out the underexposed portions without losing all of the detail on the fully exposed portions, but that doesn't look too good. However, if your scene doesn't move too much, you can take a whole bunch of photos on a tripod, then stack them to form a 16 bit per color (36 bit RGB image) and that gives you a lot of dynamic range, so then you can change the curves and get detail for the bright and the dark, like I explain here:

Indoor-Outdoor exposure experiments

Also, here's an example of two photos - one being correctly exposed for indoors and the other for outdoors - being stacked. The detail is reduced everywhere, but the window, which was washed out completely, now does show some detail of outside.

Two Stacked

Hope this helps! Have fun. I gotta run.

-Jesse

[Salamander]

The moon is only 97% full.
The “broken” bit will show up in 2-3 days.

Worry not.

[Salamander]

I’m a voodoo chile, lord I’m a voodoo chile.
Yeah.
The night I was born, lord the moon stood a fire red.
Said the night I was born, the moon turned a fire red.
My poor mother her cryin’, she said “The gypsy was right!”
And she fell right dead.

Hey, and he said “Fly on, fly on!”, ‘cause I’m a voodoo chile, baby, voodoo chile.

[Salamander]

After Mt St Helens blew, we had gorgeous red moons on the east coast for months.

We still see them often, depending on whether some jack pine barrens are wild-burning in VA or not.

I have a suspicion that the Revelation “red moon” will *not* be something as sublime and nice as the regular “red moons”.

[Vroomfondel]

Sweet! Thanks!