Cosmic Challenge: Freestyle Surrealistic Super Moon

A free-styling attempt to capture the ‘Super Moon’ along with Alejandro Colunga’s surreal sculptures in Puerto Vallarta.

My first shot of the Alejandro Colunga set of ‘magic-realism’ sculptures in the Puerto Vallarta night was a little out of focus (I forgot my tripod). To counteract this I ran it through a Stackables formula and was fairly pleased with the results. But there was a problem, the Super Moon came up on the other side of the mountains above the city and by the time it was visible it was quite small. It did set on the water but merely looked beautiful, not ‘super’.

I wanted to have the moon as a much more prominent item. I had to wait until I got home – my iPad mini 1 was crashing almost all the time plus I knew I had this guy. He’s actually just a regular Blue Moon, not the Super Moon.So now I would attempt to create a Super Moon to end all Super Moons. I tried layering various shots of the sea, sculptures and moon. This is a part-way attempt.
It took dozens of minute adjustments to come up with this version: the moon and sea have been blurred; distracting elements removed; the reflection adjusted; a halo added around the moon; the line of the sea defined; and layers of subtle colours have been added to make the images look like they have been photographed under the same lighting.
I then ran the shot through Pixlromatic, a free app from Autodesk. They have some starry ‘cosmic’ overlays that seemed appropriate for this challenge.
My ultimate choice was this one – this is the most ‘free-styling’ of the bunch!
More of K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge: Freestyle Effects.