Just another Moon shot

[Calzinger]

This is my first real attempt at a moon shot, sorry for what has seemed to become a cliche.

I just got a Kenko 2xTC Pro 300 DG and wanted to test it out. The results wide open were pretty awful at 100% mag, but two stops down rendered certainly usable results. The image below is effectively a 100% crop.

Credit goes to Bernoulli (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=610998) for the processing technique. I just boosted vibrance to the max, only seems to work if your white balance is spot on.

40D, 70-200 2.8L, Kenko 1.4x & 2x TCs stacked
1/15" f/22 ISO100 560mm (896mm 35mm equiv)
http://calzinger.net/uploads/misc/IMG_3747.jpg

[powerslave]

I think the crop looks a little asymmetric. The "dark side of the moon" appears to have been clipped with no dead space like on the right.

[Calzinger]

I think the crop looks a little asymmetric. The "dark side of the moon" appears to have been clipped with no dead space like on the right.
Care to show me how you would've cropped it? Anything that was "clipped" would've been complete black.

[powerslave]

It makes the image look asymmetric (to me). Apart from that, great shot.

[Bernoulli]

Hey Calzinger, I'm honored!

As far as the clipping, I always crop close like you did for exhibit here on POTN because you only have 1000 x 1000 pixels to work with. But when I frame something for my office, I leave dark space all the way around equal to about 1/4 the diameter of the moon. I print out a square image, usually 24 x 24 inches, with the disk spot in the middle regardless of its phase. But here, I think you did the right thing to crop out the black to emphasize the subject.

This is a really nice job of post processing. As you probably all know by now, for me that's the most fun part by far. I can spend an entire evening doing this with the TV on in my office and a Scotch on the coaster while I try to find new features in old images.

For this image, try darkening down the highlights early on in the process. The Moon's disk is very unevenly lighted, and the limb to the right is usually much brighter than the area near the terminator during its waxing phase. That bright splotch in the lower-right is the crater Stevinius, and it's fairly new (like "only" a 100 million years or so) and has very bright rays. Knock down the highlights with the "shadows/highlights" control on Photoshop or the "Highlights" command in Aperture. This will make the overall illumination more even across the disk.

Great job and thanks for sharing.