My family and I were driving to the Lincoln Memorial on our first night in Washington DC when I spotted the almost full moon near the Washington Monument. We quickly found a place to park so I could capture this moment before the moon got too high in the sky. The brightness difference between the moon and monument was so large that I had to take different exposures for them and composite them back together in Photoshop. I took eight images of the monument and two of the moon to average each set to reduce the amount of thermal noise generated in the CMOS sensor of the camera.
Photographer: Rick Scott
Date: June 26, 2010
Camera: Canon EOS 40D digital camera
Lens: Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM set to 78mm
Exposure (monument): 0.4 second at f/8 times 8 images
Exposure (moon): 1/250 second at f/8 times 2 images
Camera Mode: ISO 800 RAW
Software: Adobe Photoshop CS3 for raw conversion and image processing
Updated: 20 August 2010