Poplar Reflections in the Moonlight

Returning to the poplars (but a different group of them, but next to) of the other night, the moon was full, but as I walked there, laden with tripod, lenses and stuff, it clouded over, drifting in milky waves.

The 30 second exposure just had to be tried reflected in a run-off tributary of the River Avon, used for diversion at times of high levels. Though the view was over a kiddie's play area and houses, I might not ever get the full moon lined up low behind these poplars again, at least reflected.

The main trouble was that foreground is very much darker than the sky, so much so that the reflected tree tops were lost in darkness. To try and punch some light in the lower corners, I even went into Photoshop CS distortion filters and manually whacked up the vignetting setting, which correspondingly gave me white top corners too. These I cloned back in, using the areas of sky just a bit lower down.

The reflection looks soft purely because the river has flowed for 30 secs, breaking it up.

Other pics I tried with wider lenses had more sky, some with great colour, pinky orange but the reflection that I so wanted was lost. As ever, I had dozens of choices for my blip, with the later sunrise being photographed with shrouds of mist over the river (the Avon proper) further upstream, with swans, very beautiful and atmospheric etc.

But, I guessed that this would be more unusual than those and is what I'd set out to record.

As with other river time exposure a while ago (the black & white one) it was the outline and symmetry that I wanted, so monochrome again. In the end I decided to make it a bit more spooky by keeping the human aspects intact; it looked rather flat and less interesting as just a silhouette. I finally added a small amount of blue photo-filter, to make it more 'lunar'.