An Early Morning Attempt

I decided to get up early this morning and take advantage of the morning light and how it plays on the landscapes. Once I got outside and saw the moon I was thrilled, I thought "Oh YEAH I can get some great shots of the full moon hanging just above the mountains playing peak-a-boo with the clouds!" After many failed attempts at figuring out what ISO, F stop etc. to use the moon disappeared behind the clouds just before it the "hanging just above the mountains part", yet another failed attempt at getting just what I was looking for, the story of my life.



Yeah great, thanks for nothing. I went back into the barn to finish feeding the horses that were waiting so patiently. Not to be one to accept defeat easily, I kept looking out the door to make sure I wasn't missing anything and spied upon this:



This is straight out of the camera so please excuse the dark foreground. I took a lot of pictures of this while playing with my nemesis, the polarizer filter. I swear some day I WILL conquer that thing! At this point the horses have stopped being patient and began banging on their stalls to let me know that picture time is OVER and food time is REQUIRED.....NOW! So, I got the horses all finished up and happy and shot this picture of Big Mare:



I took this shot in RAW, I've been reading about how wonderful RAW is and that if I start shooting in RAW I'll never go back to jpg. Well, I soon figured out that in order to fully enjoy RAW I need to learn a LOT more about Photoshop and buy Lightroom so I'm back to jpg for awhile. Anyway, I did make some adjustments to this photo, I lightened it up of course, boosted the color, did a glausean blur, and brought back the horse and the mud with the layer mask.

After playing around with all of that I took just one last look at all of the shots I got this morning before hitting the delete button and found THIS ONE!



I did have to do some work to this one too. I did some color matching with another photo I got later in the morning so the trees were greener, sharpened it up a bit, boosted, etc. I cloned the darker clouds from a corner I was going to crop off over next to the moon, did the cropping and sat back to enjoy the result. NICE! At least the morning wasn’t a total loss.