Random Excellence: Ned Bunnell (Blood Moon)

Ned Bunnell, Blood Moon

Ned writes: "Here’s the story. Since all my big lenses are in storage while we renovate our new-to-us old ranch house, all I had was my iPhone XS and Ricoh GR. I’m really not into moonscapes, so I just to took a quick snap with the phone.

"As you can imagine, the moon was no more than a spec of dust on my XS display. I knew there’d be thousands of similar images of this tiny moon on Instagram. I love visual challenges, like in the old days when I’d quickly sketch editorial or product concept illustrations for a client. So I spent no more than 15 minutes playing with different image combinations using Darkroom and Snapseed. The base image of the sailboat was shot with my GR several weeks ago.

"What I find interesting is that with over 200 likes on my Instagram feed, quite a few folks congratulated me on the amazing capture or wonderful photograph. This surprised me, so I added a description in the caption explaining it was actually two images combined."

(Posted by) Mike
(Thanks to NB)

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Harsh reality

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Comments

[David Evans]

I'm uneasy about this image. With an eclipsed moon in that position the Sun ought to be well below the horizon, so the lighting is all wrong. Nothing wrong with going for an unreal effect, of course, but I think I would have used a larger image of the moon to make the unreality more obvious.

[wts]

This would be a remarkable image if a single image, even if heavily processed, Two images combined if subject is not abstract - not so much.

[Collin J Örthner]

I realized that in my previous comment I hadn't mentioned this being a composite. Please don't take this in any way as me putting these same techniques in Tom Mangelsen's hands, as I doubt he does any compositing.