Fun with Photoshop last night

Last night two simultaneous events turned the city into an eerie event. At 9PM the Empire State Building was lit up with a light show of animals and the earth to raise awareness for endangered species. At the same time a full moon slowly rose in the eastern sky. I thought that combining the two might make for a more spectacular event.

I set up two cameras on separate tripods. A Sony RX100 IV was used to photograph the Empire State Building because I was also shooting some 4k video with it. To obtain a large photo of the moon I mounted a Nikon 80-400mm zoom with 1.7 teleconverter on a Fuji X-T1. This gave me an effective full frame focal length of 1020mm. The real trick when photographing the moon with an extremely long lens is to avoid motion blur. I set the camera for electronic shutter to avoid shutter blur, and also used a 2-second shutter delay with the timer. I boosted the ISO to 800 because I needed a fast enough shutter speed to stop the movement of the moon. The moon moves quite rapidly in the sky and motion blur is a very common cause of blur.

Later I combined two of the images into one montage using individual layers in Photoshop. And that was it.