April | 2015 | John Wallace Photography

Sometimes I find that I’ve captured a great image of the sky and then wonder what to do with it. On this occasion it was the beautiful lighting that occurs at daybreak and then only lasts a moment or two. Having captured it, it seemed to cry out for an image in front to make it more dramatic somehow, that’s when I found this statue of the soldiers in the local park. So just grabbed the figures and reduced them to almost black, scaled back on the cropping to fit the sky image better and merged the two, the result gave me what I’d been thinking of.

Dawn of the Warrior

Ok so I failed on the basic rule to not put the subject in the middle of the frame but on this occasion it seemed to work better, open for comment on this one.

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It’s a clear night and there’s a full moon just staring down at you. Ever tried to take a photo of the moon, you have a camera right so of course you have and what do you get, a white dot in a sea of black. It’s pretty tricky right, it’s very bright and the shot looked straight forward until I took it and looked at the result.

What was obvious was that for me to get a reasonable image in the frame I needed a telephoto lens and ideally a tripod. I tried a few shots with my 250mm telephoto resting on a beanbag, left the lens on AF and achieved big patches of white blur, not good. So moved to manual focus, and started bracketing shots and achieved some reasonable (though still small) images, great if I just wanted to add a moon to a landscape.

Moon Example

Then I managed to get hold of a small telescope (1200 mm) and with the camera attached for once managed to fill the frame and yes I had to use a tripod but the telescope spotting scope helped as the image was being viewed using the camera preview and without the spotter I would have found searching the blackness for that elusive bright patch really frustrating. Adding to this the fact that for all long lenses the slightest movement to the tripod this end caused big movement the other didn’t help.

The end result after a lot of shots was passable but it was great fun trying to work it out not forgetting of course that the moon is moving all the time so a few minutes after I put it in the frame it was out again. I’ve attached an image showing the result and an image of the cats that I thought would work using the moon as a silhouette.