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 with the Super Moon which unfortunately came up on the other side of the mountains above the city. By the time it was visible over the water it was quite small, and merely looked beautiful, not ‘super’.

I wanted to have the moon as a much more prominent item. This moon is actually just a regular Blue Moon, not a 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.