Editing Multiple Long Exposures

The other night, I decided I wanted to get a photograph of the moon rising over the 101 Highway, on a section nicknamed The Grade. I had seen the moon rising over The Grade before, but I just remembered that I had wanted to go and photograph it. While I was out shooting, I was shooting 30 second exposures of the highway until the moon started to rise, then I exposed for the moon at 1/4th of a second. I talk more about how I was shooting the photograph in my live stream.

How the final composition turned out.

Before the moon had risen, I kept shooting the highway, because I knew I was going to overlay the photographs on top of each other, to give the appearance of lots of cars / the freeway being busier than it really was. I knew also that if I didn't move my camera while shooting, I would just lay all of the photos over each other and I should be fine.

After importing the photographs into Lightroom, I did no editing on them, but I brought them all straight into Photoshop as layers. From there, I put the photograph of the moon on the top of the layer stack, and changed the blending modes of all the layers (except the bottom layer) to "lighten". From there, I saved the file, and finished all the fine-tuning of the editing in Lightroom.

Layers in Photoshop

I think the photograph came out very nicely, and I'm pretty happy with it! If you would like, don't forget to follow my social media and check out my store if you want this image as a print!