Crescent Moon and Mercury at Dusk

The waxing crescent moon and Mercury setting behind the mountains during the blue hour. I went out of my hometown and had a ride up to the near mountain in order to be able to capture the crescent moon. While the landscape was getting darker and darker it was more difficult to capture this scenery in a single exposure, because of my equipment’s limitations (limited dynamic range – weak shadow recovery). In order to overpass those limitations, I captured two different exposures from the exact same spot; one for the sky, in order to capture properly the details of the crescent moon and then one long exposure of some more seconds in order to capture a proper exposure for the foreground. Before blending those two exposures and because these two exposures haven’t the same brightness, I reduced in post processing the brightness of the long exposure by three stops of light in order to match with the exposure for the sky and to be as natural as possible.

Technical Details: Photo Composite (Blended Exposures), Nikon D3300, Tamron 70-210mm f4, Sky: @70mm | ISO 800 | f6.3 | 2 sec, Foreground: @70mm | ISO 800 | f6.3 | 25 sec