Starry, Starry Flight

Starry, Starry Flight

In starry, starry flight between a blushing moon and earthy light —
Ghostly forms — both sign and seal of near and distant storms,
Slowly swim and glide below the jeweled span in which they hide,
Keeping midnight rendezvous with ancient lore and worlds to come.

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Last night's lunar eclipse was an extraordinary sight for mortals who happened to see it. I awoke at 12:30 a.m. and noticed the blinding moonlight from two hours earlier had disappeared and knew the eclipse was in progress.

I mounted my camera with the 55-200mm lens to a tripod and went outside in my PJ's and socks. Barb was right behind me. What a view!

After a few minutes, Barb said, "What is that?!" A flock of geese was gliding across the sky below the moon. There were about 14 of them. There was no way I could capture them since each exposure was at 3 seconds at f8. So I grabbed another picture of geese I had, worked it in Photoshop and added it to this picture to approximate the look and feel of seeing this flock right below a red-orange moon!
Like Ansel Adams said, "Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter." I had to add the geese, but what a night to remember!

Here's the original picture I used, and here's how I did it: Working in Photoshop Elements 9.0, I wanted to bring up the stars (there were only about 3-5 of them showing in the original). So I used the oval selector tool and circled the moon. Then I opened Levels and lowered the highlights and contrast to darken it quite a bit. Then I opened Shadows/Highlights (Curves) and lightened the shadows. This made the invisible stars come up. If I went too far, the black background got too light and blotchy, so I backed off just enough to eliminate that. While I was doing this, the dark moon came up to a more normal color. Had I not darkened it at first, it would have been blown out when bringing up the stars. Then I used Layers again to make the black really black.

I found a shot of geese in flight I had taken earlier, tightly cropped them and resized them to a size that would fit when I placed them on my 1100px wide worked copy. The geese were dark on a light sky, so I inverted the shot (Ctrl and "I" keys), which made the background dark and the geese light. I used the paint bucket fill to blacken the background, then used a color that approximated what I saw (kind of a grayish brown from the city lights) and painted each goose with it. Sometimes the paint would only fill 1/2 of the goose, so I used a slightly lighter color to do the other wing. Then I placed them on the worked copy where I wanted them, rotated them, flattened the layers, then used the Brush tool to color them further. I know they look painted, but that's the best I can do. I purposely left them very dark, just like in real life. Just a hint of city light.

I added the larger star on the left to give more balance and a few small stars near the geese (remember, there was a black square around them when I placed them on the working copy.

Guess I could have spent more time on it, but I'm happy with it as is. Interestingly, I could only make it a 84kb file due to all the black in it!