About a week ago, I had the chance to witness a rare astrological event: a super blue blood moon. This mouthful of a title signifies that moon was at its perigee (closest point to Earth), was the second full moon within the same month, and was a total lunar eclipse. The last one occurred over 150 years ago, so of course I was not going to miss the opportunity to shoot this event.
I toyed with several concepts for how the shoot would go. I wanted an iconic or at least interesting foreground that wouldn't obstruct the moon. Ultimately, I settled on shooting at the Santa Monica Pier. My concept for the shot was a composite of the moon as it transitioned through the eclipse. Since California would not get to see the eclipse end due to the timing of the moonset, I decided to have the moon start and stop at about the same coverage.
To create the various images I would need, I started by attaching my 50-140mm (a 70-200 equivalent for Fujifilm) and aiming it at the sky. Using the app Photopills to guide me, I set up my shot so the moon would pass directly across my frame. Once I had captured all the shots of the moon I would need, I proceeded to change to my 16-55 (a 24-70 equivalent) to capture the pier itself. I waited to take the base shot of the pier for two reasons. First, since I started shooting around 4am, there was no light on the pier and therefore the only details were illuminated by harsh white LED lights on the pier. Second, the sky was pitch black at 4am, and I knew I wanted a deep blue color in the sky to add some color to the shot. With all the shots needed for the composite, I moved into Photoshop.
When shooting the eclipse, the sky was totally black. This allowed for me to very easily blend the moon shots into one image by loading all the images into a folder and setting each layer's blending mode to lighten. I then created an ellipse using the marquee tool and lowered the shape's opacity to create a smooth line. I used this line to align all of the moons into a smooth curve. Since this took up an entire frame, I had to downscale this image to fit in with the base shot of the pier.
My base shot of the pier can be seen to the left. When blending the moon transition line image into this shot, I ran into several difficulties. First, while the lighting on the pier is great, since the sun had come up and the lights on the rides had turned on, the sky is now too bright. When blending images using a blend mode like lighten or screen (these both remove dark parts of the image and leave the lighter visible), the moons themselves were too dark in comparison to the sky, and the moons became washed out. I compensated for this in several ways.
First, I created a color mask of the sky, which allowed me to draw a darker gradient behind the pier. Since this created a gradient by default (the color in the sky wasn't uniform, so my selecting a color at the top to mask out, I could maintain some color in the bottom. Next I added in the moons. Since I had to downscale them, and there were empty pixels, I filled the rest of the layer with black so the screen would would. I then set the blend mode of the downsized moon folder to screen. This resulted in the image to the right.
There are some obvious issues with this image. The moons are clearly still washed out, since the sky isn't dark enough for the screen blend mode to function properly. There are a bunch of people that need to be removed from the image as well.
The first thing I did was duplicate the folder with the moons. This added some detail back to the moon, but unfortunately not enough. My next step involves an understanding of the screen blend move. In short, the blend mode makes anything black completely invisible. Since the moons were on the screen blend mode, and were being washed out by the blue in the sky that was showing through where there was previously black in the sky.
So I created a selection of the moons without the sky using the quick selection tool and filled the masked layer with black. This allowed for the moons to look like they did when resting on black, since now they actually are on black. To further darken the sky and maintain the saturation that rest of the image had, I applied a hue / saturation layer and a brightness / contrast layer using another mask of the sky, this one being a little more inclusive than the last one I used.
At this point, all that was left was to remove the people and make some final color and contrast adjustments to finalize the blend and add a little kick. The final image can be seen here to the left, and on my Instagram!
Feel free to hit me up in the comments here or on social media with any questions!