Tonight is the night that the moon appears in very nearly the same position and phase as it did for Ansel Adams’ famous 1960 photo Moon and Half Dome.

Readers will recall that Scott and I had made plans to be in the Ahwanee meadow at 4:08 this afternoon, but later thought better of it. Good thing – neither Half Dome nor the moon chose to show up for the occasion (though last night was pretty good, we hear).

We did however try to think about a ‘Moon and Menlo Park’ photo, and after much thought, not to mention a decision to take a nap that ran a little overtime, decided that our driveway was the best place for the photo.

Since we were late, the sun was gone from the foreground trees, necessitating a little ‘darkroom’ magic to make the picture work. Linda took the lovely photo you see here, but the exposure necessary to capture the leaves against the sky resulted in a moon that was completely blown out. As good as modern digital sensors are, they can’t handle a more than 5 stop exposure difference.

Ansel Adams, faced with a similar problem in the famous Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico (1940), was able to use a technique called water-bath development to preserve his 8×10 negative’s detail both in the darker foreground and the bright clouds, mountaintops and moon in the background. There’s no ‘development,’ water-bath or otherwise, in digital sensor land. But there is Photoshop.

A few minutes after Linda made her nicely framed composition, I made some images of the moon using a technique called bracketing. With the camera set to manual exposure, I made a series of pictures at progressively shorter exposures, some of which captured the craters et al. on the moon at the same ISO as Linda’s photo, so that the image “grain” (or “noise” in digital parlance) would match.

Later, we used image editing software to blend the two images, mainly Adobe Photoshop. Not as pure, nor nearly as interesting, as Mr. Adams’ effort, but we’ll take it…

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