About half way through my year with the Wych Elms of Assynt, and I’m still finding new aspects to these trees, despite the ongoing leafless months of winter.
These are about to come to an end though; the buds are getting fat, and it won’t be long before flowers appear.

Think about it; trees like this stand out there constantly through the years: decades or centuries.
They get everything; all weathers, seasons, inhabitants, consumers.
No break either; no warm lounge to escape the winter, no holidays to relieve the stress.
I’m trying to reflect this by photographing them through changing conditions, showing them in the landscape as well as the details close up.

Night time.
A silhouette maybe; probably better in the winter without leaves.
And for this, a source of light: a full moon.

The wish list of how to achieve this had me thinking.
I’m going to need a sky visible through the canopy: not a rock face or other trees then.
And a suitable angle of view to shoot the tree and the moon too.
A bit of research later, and I had an idea of shooting east just after moon rise.
Consulting the map and the contours, I think I’ve found a suitable candidate; and it happens to be only a short walk in the dark too.
The predicted altitude of the moon was a bit of guess work standing in my own garden trying to match an estimated angle with what I found on the ‘net.

Full moon day: 24th February 24.
We’d already climbed Quinag (mountain) in the snow during the day, so it was a quick turnaround before my Saturday night out.

Other preparation I’d done included finding out how to do automatic “bracketing” of exposure on my camera. It’s actually a basic thing for a lot of keen photographers, but not a function that I’d used before. And I reckoned that it might be essential due to the huge variation of brightness between the moon and my tree. Adjusting the settings without touching the camera and knocking it out of position.

So I left the car park with camera, tripod, alternative lenses, warm clothes and four different torches, and launched myself into the darkness.
Except it wasn’t that dark really; the rising full moon gave enough light that I didn’t need a torch to follow the track.
Across the grass and dead bracken towards my tree-for-the-evening, I could already see its silhouette against a slightly brighter sky.
A lot of rustling and footfall had me reaching for the torch, to see about eight red deer legging it up the hill.
Already realising that the moonlight would be in my face, and the bottom of the tree would be in shadow anyway, I’d taken a small diffused camping light that we keep for power cuts at home, and I was going to use it to partially illuminate the foreground.
There is a stone wall between me and the tree, so I lodged the lamp on the other side, and took a while to walk backwards and forwards to the camera position to check that it was about right.
The sky was getting brighter all the time, and I knew that the moon was about to appear, so my initial relaxed attitude was replaced with a sense of urgency. Once it appeared, the moon wasn’t going to stop whilst I fiddled about, was it!
Kinda blessed with a thin veil of cloud, which might take a bit of brightness from the moon.

Then it appeared, and I grabbed the tripod and repositioned it to get an “interesting composition” and pressed the button.
The camera took a sequence of five photos at different exposures: guesswork was about right; three of the five were usable to some degree.
Now the moon had moved again, so to repeat the process, I had to move my kit and start again too.
Reviewing images, I thought that I might not be able to improve anything much right now, so packed the kit away.
On cue, a big cloud came and obliterated the moon. Lucky, or what!

Back down the track; drive home; crack a beer……

The next day, I’m pleased to say that I hadn’t wasted my time.
I used computer software to combine 3, 4 or 5 frames, to get the brightest tree and the dullest moon, so put together, the exposure just about balanced.
Tried to make it look plausible.
Cameras, even the poshest, don’t have the dynamic range of a human eye, so this was necessary for me to produce a photo that looked like what I’d seen myself.

Next time: Milky Way.
I do love the Milky Way, so I’ll be considering how to do this one.
And instead of a full moon, it’ll be “no moon”, so I really will need my torch.

A couple of “also-rans”:

And these are the four photos that were combined to make the image at the top of this blog: