Palouse Falls Moonlight

Ryan, this is on my list of places to go.  The scene is spectacular.  HOwever the lighting is little uninteresting.  Check out this link of another view of the falls

http://www.chipphillipsphotography.com/Landscapes/Rivers-and-Streams/3813175_jPTD59#444910365_j9c8k

This treatment is much more dramatic.  Maybe a little less exposure and a more interesting sky would help but never the less I really like your image.

Great capture of a beautiful scene.

Maybe darker would be better, I mean would suit better the caption and the real situation! As it is one can hardly believe it's a moon light!

Best regards Ryan!

PDE

I think it can be very difficult to get an effective shot at night that still looks like night.  It's too easy to turn night into day with a long exposure.  Except for the stars, this looks like day.  The only solution that I can see is a much shorter exposure, resulting in a lot less detail, but I'm not sure how that would look in this particular scene; I can envision stars, the white from the falls, and little else, and that wouldn't be very exciting.  I think the comparison with the photo from Chip Phillips is not very valid because the two were taken at very different times of the day.

I tried decreasing the amount of light via curves, then selected the blue in the sky and desaturated that.  The result looked more like a night shot, and I think there was still enough detail for an interesting photo.

Thanks for comment and suggestions everyone. If you properly expose for a full moonlit scene it should look like daylight. The only difference will be movement in the scene will show blur because of the longer exposure. Once your eyes adjusted to a full moonlit evening you have no need for flashlights. I have noticed the Palouse with it's wide open sky and little light pollution the full moon skies will be blue. If the scene was only illuminated by a partial moon or stars then you would have a darker scene and bolder stars. Next time when there's a full moon try capturing the scene. A good starting exposure is f/4 @ 30 seconds ISO 1000. My exposure was f/5.6 @ 72 seconds ISO 1000.

For this scene I was trying to capture a lunar rainbow on the falls. Last year I was able to capture one. This year, probably because of the freezing weather I was not able to capture one. I wanted to share a photo from that evening because of how uniquely different it is from other photographs of the falls. 

Thanks everyone,

Ry

Ryan, I think it depends on what you mean by "properly expose."  The camera meter wants to see the perennial 18% gray.  In trying to get there, it will turn night into day, and the camera will consider that properly exposed.  However, even after your eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I'm quite sure you didn't see this much detail across the landscape.  To be "properly exposed" so that night looks like night, there would be much less light and much less detail than is shown here.

I once did a moonlight bike ride on the Going-To-The-Sun Highway in Glacier Park.  The main light was a full moon, and I rode from about 9:30 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. (and then back down by 3:00 a.m.).  With the full moon, I could see the outlines of the mountains, but I couldn't see the road too well without a headlamp (and I didn't want those mountain bikes that were screaming down the road in a suicide run to slam into me, which was the main reason for the headlamp; when I couldn't hear the whine of their tires racing downhill, I switched the lamp off).  I could have taken a photo that showed the relatively black sky looking blue, and in those photos I could have seen trees on the mountains that were just big geologic forms in the moonlight.  So it all gets back to what we mean by "properly exposed" and what we want the photograph to depict.

If you were after the moonlight rainbow, then a long exposure makes more sense.  However, if you can also see that rainbow at night with your eyes, then you may want to try some exposures with less light.  On the other hand, you have experience from doing this before, and that's more valuable than my armchair ramblings.