[sealonsf]

Not sure if this works (dark, yet blown out)... interested in your thoughts... Taken at Monument Valley.

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[igowerf]

Definitely way too dark, but the composition is pretty nice. If you had shot in raw, this would definitely be recoverable. Even with the original JPG, you might be able to recover some of the lost detail.

[sealonsf]

Definitely way too dark, but the composition is pretty nice. If you had shot in raw, this would definitely be recoverable. Even with the original JPG, you might be able to recover some of the lost detail.

Thanks, I don't disagree. I shot raw but if I bring up the exposure it wasn't working very well - too noisy and my denoise with DXO couldn't take care of it all - and an ugly building in the foreground. Everything I was doing didn't seem to help it much. I might have to let this one go! :-)

[Ash]

It would have to be reshot IMO.
You should expose for the subject rather than the sun, which is what the camera would want to expose for (to avoid blowing out highlights). Then you have more latitude with PP to get the effect desired. HDR makes such a scene look washed out, and you don;t need to save the highlight details in the sun, so shoot for the background and PP should try and save the sky details.

[sealonsf]

It would have to be reshot IMO.
You should expose for the subject rather than the sun, which is what the camera would want to expose for (to avoid blowing out highlights). Then you have more latitude with PP to get the effect desired. HDR makes such a scene look washed out, and you don;t need to save the highlight details in the sun, so shoot for the background and PP should try and save the sky details.

Thank you for that explanation - that helps. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

[Ash]

No worries. It is quite hard to salvage a highly underexposed photo even with low ISO. All the best with that.

[Mallee Boy]

Not sure if this is a jpeg or raw ? Raw would have more potential, jpeg less so, but certainly not a lost cause.
I immediately wonder what detail is in the darks in the foreground...try and brush them over and play with exposure, Pentax is very good at preserving detail, so there maybe more in the dark areas than you think. Even a visit to NIK might be worthwhile. Goodluck, the image has something. You mention an ugly building ? can you crop that out and make it into a pano ?

[sealonsf]

Not sure if this is a jpeg or raw ? Raw would have more potential, jpeg less so, but certainly not a lost cause.
I immediately wonder what detail is in the darks in the foreground...try and brush them over and play with exposure, Pentax is very good at preserving detail, so there maybe more in the dark areas than you think. Even a visit to NIK might be worthwhile. Goodluck, the image has something. You mention an ugly building ? can you crop that out and make it into a pano ?

Thanks for your thoughts.
It is raw but very noisy if I try to bring up the exposure. The building is too close to the important elements of the shot to crop it out. I tried to remove it but not very successfully.

I'd set up my tripod to try to catch the moonrise and had given up and gone inside - then of course the moon started peeking out from the side of the hills so I missed the best moment.

[tuco]

It's not a landscape.

[Rondec]

This is a night shot, not? I mean it is iso 800 shot at 13 seconds. It still feels really under exposed to me. Probably needs a longer exposure in order to get the landscape a bit of detail -- either that or do some light painting with a flashlight or some such thing. Probably would be tough to get a proper exposure of the foreground and still have the moon look like a moon without doing some type of combination of exposures.

[RGlasel]

This is a night shot, not? I mean it is iso 800 shot at 13 seconds.

Good catch, I missed that when I first looked at it. I now see that aperture was f29, which explains the weird starburst pattern. Depending on how much digital fidgeting the OP wants to do, one shot could be taken to expose for the moon, one shot to expose for the foreground and then combine the two. Not blowing out the moon also means that the moonlit clouds will look much better and I don't think there is a single exposure setting that will allow for capturing enough detail from both the sky and the foreground.


At 53mm, this lens is wide open at f4.5, which will be good for depth of field and sharpness for everything except possibly the "ugly building in the foreground." A full moon is a pretty big light source and will dominate the image no matter what, so if the OP wants to avoid a composite image, then I would expose to get the moon looking like a moon at ISO 100 and use a mask to brighten up the foreground. Whatever foreground detail can be recovered is better than black.

Assuming that there won't be another opportunity to take the same picture, then my suggestion is to try making this photo darker, so the moon's starburst doesn't overpower the clouds so much and the outline of the foreground will still be visible.

[Madaboutpix]

Phew. This is a hard one to salvage. Bit of a shame too, since, I take it, a simple reshoot is not an option. Perhaps it was just an innocent oversight, but why would you want to shoot anything like this at F29, where you run into diffraction issues and other areas of possible weirdness?

I wouldn't even say that composition is what ruins the image for me. The framing is perfectly justifiable, while I do agree with other posters that a bit of fore- and midground detail, even in your anxiousness to avoid distractions, would have helped a lot. But my main gripe is with the moon, which doesn't look like a moon at all. For a moonlit landscape shot, you should probably have a recognizable moon. Which entails that you should meter, likely even focus for it, and/or use exposure bracketing and HDR techniques to bring it out properly.

[Biosaurus]

Not sure if this works (dark, yet blown out)... interested in your thoughts... Taken at Monument Valley.

We feel the warm sun, very nice