Moonlight Sonata

Moonlight Sonata
www.jasonmatias.com

I named the piece "Moonlight Sonata" after Beethoven's composition. He has a piece in it titled Com...
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Moonlight Sonata
www.jasonmatias.com

I named the piece "Moonlight Sonata" after Beethoven's composition. He has a piece in it titled Composing by Moonlight. Truthfully though, my favorite pieces from this collection are Beethoven's Despair (which should be paired with Fur Elise), and Beethoven's three part Decent into Madness. These four pieces have always made me think of the stars.

I spent most of the night looking for compositions and waiting for the moon to set so that I could capture the first star trails of the year on Jan 1st, 2015. When it came time, at 4AM, I could hardly be pulled away from the fire. I kinda knew that the moon might set between these sea stacks but wasn't sure that I'd be able to get the angle because of the tide. When I saw the moon glow orange on the horizon life became a mad, wet, dash to line up my lens for the shot.

The process:
This photo is actually a 3 image composite. The moon drops so fast that I really had to rush, shoot, move to take this photo. All frames are ISO 800 and f/4. The stars and most of the sky are a 15s exposure. Enough to see, not too so long that the stars moved in the photo. The sea stacks and water are 30s. Had I had more time to think, I probably would have shot this after the frenzy for a few minute exposure to really capture everything they could offer in terms of definition. The moon is a 1.6s exposure. I blended the three manually in PS after processing in Camera Raw. One notable edit from CR, I used 70% luminosity noise reduction to fight the noise in the rocks. In PS I used tonal contrast edits to bring the definition back with almost no noise.
And that's the story of that.
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