This is an infrared image of the moon, some clouds, and part of a bush, taken around 4:00 pm in my backyard.  Apart from the clouds, there was a bright blue sky.  The infrared capture and black and white conversion create the illusion of darkness.  Actually, I would not know how to get a capture remotely approaching this at night, in which the sky is black but the clouds are fully illuminated.

As an experiment, I ran this through the HDR process in Photomatix, but I’m not sure it had any effect in the end.  The bush is still mostly in silhouette.  And just for reference, I’ll note that the HDR was from a single image even though I shot 9 bracketed shots.  The clouds were moving so fast that using multiple images would have created a muddled mess.  Instead, I created 5 artificial brackets from the baseline image, by making 4 copies of it, and setting the exposure at +/-1 and +/-2 on them.  Although the HDR effect is not really ascertainable here, that is a good trick for making an HDR from a single image, as long as the raw file from your camera captures that much of an exposure range.

One last note, I was in the backyard shooting something else when I first noticed that the moon was up and that it was perfectly situated in a certain cloud formation.  I decided to finish what I was doing before switching to shoot the moon, and very nearly regretted it.  I had not considered that the clouds were not static and that waiting even 2-3 minutes might mean that the shot I envisioned would disappear.  I just about captured this image before the clouds, which were moving right to left, obscured the moon for several minutes, before it reappeared , but was no longer framed by the horseshoe cloud formation.  Had I been just a few moments later I would have missed the opportunity.

The post title is from “Marquee Moon,” by the band Television.