Lunar Eclipse

Tonight there was a total eclipse of the moon. They say it won't happen again, at least here in Minnesota, till 2010. I've never tried photography the moon so I figured I'd give this a shot. Ha! pun!.

It was a crystal clear night however it was also only 1 degree out so I decided to try shooting from a window. I did go to the trouble of opening the window for each shot thinking that I would avoid the distortion of the glass. But now I wonder if I just introduced distortion of all the heat waves I was letting out!

The experiment was so-so. None of the shots were very sharp but the exposures were fairly ok. The left most exposure was of the complete eclipse. I had to drop the shutter speed from 1/250 to 1/4 ofa second just to get anything. It was only then that you could see into the shadow. All the detail was always there in the previous shots but was overwhelmed by the bright side.

Shibuya Panorama Revisited

I just had to go back into this panorama. So much of what makes this corner so cool are all the huge video screens. I think there are 3-4. But the pano doesn't really show them. The overexposed one on the right, called Super Lisa, was kind of unavoidable but the monster one right in the middle, the Q-Front, is barely noticeable - and its 3 stories high! It was bad timing that there wasn't a feed when I snapped the 3 shots for the panorama.

But looking through all my photos of that evening I came across a shot with a decent exposure of both screens. So I just had to go back in. The Super Lisa monitor was simple. I cropped out the screen area on the original and scaled the image to fit. A little color correction and it was done. The Q-Front was a little more tricky because of the grid running through the image and the building. But actually the grid helped me register the 2 as I scaled down the image on a separate layer. Once in place I used a little math to do the combining. I set the image layer blend mode to Add which takes the pixel value of the top layer and adds it to the pixel value layer underneath. So white (256) + black(0) = 256 (white). So what happens is that all the black of the image at a value of 0 does not get added to the original wall color. No need to do a ton of erasing. Neat huh?
One last thing I had to do was to go into the added images and try to match the noise. It's a little weird to think about adding noise but if you looked really closely you would notice the videos being smoother then the surroundings. That can tell the brain that something funny is going on.

To me this now better captures my experience of Shibuya even thou it is not a photo of a real moment in time.