Photographing my First Moonrise

This was the first time I've ever photographed a moonrise. First time I've ever done anything like it, if I'm honest. So I went out with my great friend Ben Kapur, and he showed me the ropes. Ben had done all the planning beforehand with an app called PhotoPills, plus a few other little things he knows, so in theory we knew exactly where the moon would come up behind a church in the distance.

In theory. The night itself didn't go quite to plan. Even with all that planning, we still stood there doubting ourselves. "We're in the wrong place." So we sprinted one way, then a few moments later sprinted back the other. We expected to see the moon a lot sooner than it actually turned up, and while we couldn't see it the doubt kept growing. "That's cloud. Please, no." Then the moon was up.

I never thought it would be anywhere near as exciting as it was. Who would have thought photographing the moon could be so much fun? What a night.

The kit

Both Ben and I were shooting on the Canon EOS R5 Mark II. Ben was on a 500mm EF lens. I was using the Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 L IS III, on loan from Canon for the time being, with the EF to RF adapter and a 1.4x teleconverter on the back of it. It's a fabulous lens. Absolutely fabulous lens.

The reason for all that focal length is simple. The longer you go, the more the compression kicks in, and that's what makes the moon look so enormous against the church. That's the whole trick, really.

The settings, and why they changed

Ben's ideal numbers going in were around 1/200 sec, f/8, and ISO as low as I could manage. That's the plan you'd write down before you leave the house. But by the time the moon actually showed itself, the ambient light had dropped a lot, so I ended up at 1/125 sec, f/5.6, ISO 2500.

Now, ISO 2500 is absolutely nothing for a modern camera. But the scene was so dark that when I lifted the exposure later, there was a fair bit of noise to deal with. More on that in a minute.

One thing worth saying: this is a single shot. I didn't focus separately on the church and the moon and blend them together. I wanted one single frame, with just a little bit of poetic licence added afterwards.

Choosing the frame

Ben said it's amazing if you can get the moon sitting perfectly behind the church, and we did get that. But once the craziness had calmed down and I was looking back through them on the camera, I kind of preferred the frame with the moon off to the left-hand side of the church, not dead centre behind it. That's the one I chose for the final image.

The editing, trick by trick

There honestly isn't that much editing on this picture. A handful of moves, each doing one job. Here's what they are and why they're there.

Noise reduction with DxO PureRAW 6. I'm not a fan of Lightroom's own noise reduction, and there's definitely better software out there. For me that's DxO PureRAW 6, hands down the best RAW conversion there is (and no, this isn't a promotional plug). I ran the file through it using DeepPRIME XD3, which cleans up the noise and sorts out lens sharpness, vignetting, chromatic aberration and distortion in one go. It spits out a DNG that goes straight back into Lightroom, which is where I'm comfortable working.

Adaptive Color, then pulling the brightness back. In Lightroom I set the profile to Adaptive Color, which I love, then toned the overall brightness down. That's about it for the global edit.

Bringing the brick detail back with High Pass. Here's the catch with noise reduction. On a small, distant, detailed subject like a church, it smooths away the fine brick detail along with the noise. That's just unavoidable. So in Photoshop I duplicated the layer, ran a High Pass filter at around a 5 pixel radius, and set that layer to Hard Light. That sharpens the edges hard. The trouble is it would sharpen the sky too and leave halos, so I hid the whole thing behind a black mask, selected just the church with the Object Selection tool, and filled the selection with white on the mask so the detail shows on the brickwork only. Sky stays clean, no haloing.

A touch of glow on the moon. I just wanted to add a little glow to the moon, so I merged everything to a new layer, ran the Camera Raw Filter as a smart filter, and used its Glow. The default Diffusion style made the moon detail disappear, and Halation didn't really give me much, so I settled on Bloom. I kept it very subtle, because the moon already looks unreal at that size.

Adding the birds. A few minutes before this frame, a group of birds flew across the front of the cameras, with exactly the same composition. So I borrowed them. I made two versions of this image, one with birds and one without. There were six birds in the source frame, but I used five, because I don't like even numbers. I lassoed them, dropped them onto their own layer, and lined them up where they'd been. To lose the grey sky around them I used Blend If, dragging the bright slider on the current layer until the sky dropped out, then splitting that slider with Alt or Option to soften the edges (not too far, or bits of the original background start creeping back). They were still a bit bright and didn't look right, but you can't select them cleanly while Blend If is only hiding the sky. So I merged that layer with an empty one, which turns it into a normal cutout layer, then loaded the selection, filled it with black to darken the birds, and brought the layer down to about 80% opacity.

A final crop. Back into Lightroom for a crop, and that was that. Told you it wasn't much.

Doing it again

I really enjoyed this. It's so good getting out and trying different things, and I owe Ben a big thank you for leading me through the whole night. I'm really looking forward to doing it again next month, maybe in a different location, and before then I need to get properly familiar with PhotoPills myself.

So here's my question for you. Have you ever shot a moonrise, and if you have, where would you send me next?

Still After That Kingfisher

A quick update on how I'm getting on with the wildlife photography. Short version: I'm really loving it.

A week or so back I was out early with my mate Ben Kapur at the local reservoir, hoping for another go at the resident Kingfisher. Conditions were about as good as it gets. A cool start at 3 degrees, mist sitting right across the water, and beautiful light as the sun crept up over the horizon. Photography aside, it was just a treat to be stood there.

The Kingfisher though? No-show. Almost two hours and nothing. But it was only my second time out, so any time with the camera in hand is a win, and I came away really happy with a Heron, a Great Crested Grebe and a Black-Headed Gull. I had the big lens (400mm f/2.8) on a little table top tripod fitted with one of my spare 3 Legged Thing video heads, and it works an absolute treat.

The one thing is the height I've been using it at is a little bit high, so if a bird goes up I'm going to struggle to get it in shot. My dear friend Steve Healy gifted me a Platypod Extreme, so I'm going to be trying that next time.

Then I spent a day at Seaton Wetlands with my friend Andy. Weather was all over the place, light rain most of the morning, nothing like we'd been promised the day before. The Merlin app was going mad there was that much about, and I'm already picking out birds I couldn't have named a week ago. The Kingfisher was there when we got in the hide, then made his escape, never to be seen again. Typical. Still, I got a lovely female Stonechat, and plenty of practice using the camera like a Game-Boy, dialling in settings as it all unfolds in front of you.

A Black-Headed Gull sequence even became a YouTube video, putting a bird in flight together in Photoshop, no AI.

What I'm loving is the quiet, the early light, and the slow pace and anticipation. The Kingfisher's still the one I'm after though.

Gear and settings:

• Canon R5 Mark II

• Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 III with 1.4x Converter

• Heron: 1/400 sec, f/4.0, ISO 2000

• Great Crested Grebe: 1/2000 sec, f/4.0, ISO 2500

• Black-Headed Gull: 1/2500 sec, f/4.0, ISO 1000

• Female Stonechat: 1/2000 to 1/2500 sec, ISO 4000

One for you thought …

How do you set up low down with a big lens, and does anyone use a Platypod for wildlife?

I'm all ears.

The Impact of AI on Creatives | Dave Clayton

I've wanted to have this conversation with Dave Clayton on the live for a while. The two of us talk about AI a lot when it's just us, and because he's a graphic designer rather than a photographer, he comes at it from a slightly different place to me, which always gets me thinking. So for this week's Sunday Night Live I got him on to do it properly, and the whole conversation is in the video above.

If you don't know Dave, he's been working in design and marketing for over 30 years. He's spoken at Photoshop World six times, taught at Adobe MAX, written How Do I Do That in InDesign, he's an Adobe Community Expert, and he's designed all of my book covers. Back in 2018 we did the He Shoots He Draws podcast together, which is now closing in on 330,000 downloads.

A tool or a threat?

That was the first thing I asked him, and for Dave it's a tool, at least for now. His view is that the AI itself isn't what will take work away from him; if anything does, it'll be someone in his field who knows how to use it. He also made the point that "AI" has become one word for a whole load of different things, in the same way that anything odd-looking in a photo used to just get called Photoshop.

I asked him how he feels, as someone who teaches InDesign, about people asking ChatGPT how to do something instead of coming to him, and he's relaxed about it; he can't stop it, and he'd rather people learnt however works for them. My own feeling is that AI is just another teacher in the mix, the same as the hundreds of people teaching Photoshop on YouTube, where some will click with you and some won't. Dave's warning was that it can be just as wrong as a person can. He's had it send him to a tool that had nothing to do with the job, and his name for it is "average intelligence", because all it's really doing is handing you back the average of what's already out there.

Where Dave draws the line

He won't let AI make the finished piece of work. He'll use it for research, or to get a feel for what an idea might look like before he goes off and makes it himself. The one time he used AI-generated elements in a final piece was a poster for a client on a tight budget who wanted a very specific look; he had AI make the individual pieces in that style, then put them together in Photoshop and built the poster in InDesign.

He also shared a test he'd seen on Instagram that I really like. If you'd feel ashamed telling someone you used AI for something, that's how you know you shouldn't have.

What we're actually using it for

Dave breaks his use into admin, corrective and generative. For admin and ideas he uses ChatGPT and Claude, often by voice while he's driving, so the time in the car isn't wasted. Inside the Adobe apps he sticks mostly to the corrective tools, plus the new AI Assistant in InDesign, which he used to build a table for a wedding. It doesn't generate anything; it uses InDesign's own functions for you, and you can watch what it's doing as it goes. When he teaches people to drop a generated image into a layout as a placeholder, he then has them search Adobe Stock with generative AI excluded, so a photographer gets paid for the picture that's actually used.

For me it's mostly admin. I've got a small team of AI assistants set up in Grokbot, each with its own job. One gives me a rundown of my day at seven every morning and drafts replies to my emails in my voice, which it learnt by going through a year of my sent emails, though it never sends anything itself. Another checks that sponsorship requests are genuine before I even look at them, one looks after travel, and another goes through YouTube, X and elsewhere every day to see what people are asking about and struggling with. Between them they save me hours, and it's a big part of why I've been out with the camera so much more lately.

If you'd like to try it without going that far, give AI your to-do list and ask it to remind you each day until you tell it something's done. I told mine to remind me about my car's MOT in eleven months' time, and now I don't have to think about it.

Dave was quick to point out the trade-off, which is that for AI to do all that, it has to know a lot about you. My own view is that a lot of what's out there about us was out there long before AI came along; if you want to see how much, Proper Honest Tech has a really good video showing what Amazon has worked out about you from your purchases alone.

Why it can't replace going out with a camera

Ben and I went out on the Sunday evening to try to photograph the moon rising behind a building he knew, and the cloud got in the way. We got talking about whether we'd ever photograph the building and the moon separately and put them together in Photoshop. We both could, but neither of us wants to, because the whole thrill is getting it in one frame. Dave summed it up perfectly; nobody's ever going to sit their grandchildren down to tell them about a great prompt they once wrote, but they will tell them about the day they went out and got the shot.

Who owns it?

Dave's position is that if all you've done is type a prompt, or had another AI write the prompt for you, nobody owns what comes out, and that includes AI images people are selling on stock sites. I had my own moment with this on Spotify. I'd been really enjoying a country artist called Kane Walker, then one day in the car I wondered whether it was AI, looked it up, and it was. I haven't listened since.

We also talked about Artcraft, the AI-built copy of Adobe's software. I understand the frustration behind it, but copying Adobe felt like a temper tantrum to me, and I'd far rather someone built a genuine alternative and invited people to use that. Building things with AI can be brilliant, though. I recently had Gemini recreate Stunt Rider, a game I loved on my Amstrad as a kid, and in about fifteen minutes I was playing it again, purely for fun.

The UK copyright fight

In December 2024 the government ran a consultation on letting AI companies train on anyone's work, photos included, without asking or paying unless the creator had opted out. Creatives pushed back hard, and on the 18th March the government told Parliament the idea had been overwhelmingly rejected and that it no longer has a preferred option. It's set up four working groups instead, and on the 9th October a creative industries summit in Salford launched the Manchester Principles, a draft of 29 rules on licensing, crediting creators and tracking where content comes from. None of it is law yet, so nothing has changed in either direction.

Dave's answer on whether AI companies should need permission and pay was a firm yes. They're making a fortune from work they took for free, then charging us credits to use what they built from it, and one of Dave's own books was among those used for training.

He also told me about a design studio that runs its ideas past AI, and if AI comes back with the same idea they had, they scrap it and do something else. It reminded me of helping out at a wedding years ago, when the verger told me exactly where everybody takes the photo as the couple come out of the church. My answer was that I wouldn't be doing that one then, and the look I got said it all.

Should creatives learn AI even if they hate it?

"One thousand percent" was Dave's answer. His comparison was synthesisers; when they arrived, everyone said musicians were finished, and what actually happened is musicians added synthesisers to everything they already did. He also mentioned that Firefly now lets you train a model on your own work so it creates in your style, which raises the obvious question of what stops someone training it on somebody else's.

Where I stand

I'm very much in favour of AI, but in the way I use it. It's an assistant for my admin, and in my editing I only use it to correct, remove or select something I could do by hand but that would take ages, so I've got more time for the creative side. I'll never let it take that part away from me, and I'm not a fan of people calling themselves AI artists.

Somebody told me recently to make sure I don't fill the time it gives me back with more work, and Dave said the same: go for a walk, spend time with the people you love, shop locally. Not long ago it did a job for me in about half an hour that would have taken me a full day, so Anne and I went out for coffee and lunch, and when we got back it was finished.

The title is the one you gave the live, so swap it for the YouTube title if it's different. I left out the names of people in the chat, and kept Dave's personal story about his mum out as well.

Up Early and Gifted with a Fabulous Sunrise

Headed out early yesterday morning to photograph sunrise on the coast, with the tail end of the recent storms still hanging around.

The plan was Charmouth, but when we got there not much was happening, so we carried on down to West Bay. Very glad we did.

We (me and my friend Ben Kapur) got ourselves into position knowing where the sun would be coming up. It looked good, but the light was so flat. There were clouds, but the sky was just grey and featureless.

Then, all of a sudden, the sun broke through right at the turn of high tide. We had this amazing glow coming from behind the cliff face, which ws most definitely a reward for the early start 😍

It just goes to show... don't give in, and don't pack your camera away too soon. You never know what's going to happen.

I shot this on the RF 28-70mm f/2. It's not really a landscape lens, but as I've only just changed over to Canon, it's what I had with me. Something like the 70-200mm Ben was using would have been great.

I'm now building up the lenses I need to cover my portraits, seascapes and my wildlife photography.

Next on the list is a 70-200, and I'll probably go for the f/2. I'm also likely to get the 14-35mm f/4 rather than the 15-35mm f/2.8. I'd only ever use it for landscapes, and I'll more than likely be at around f/8 anyway, so I wouldn't benefit from the f/2.8.

Anyway, a fantastic morning.

It felt so good to get out and see the start of the day.

Mornings are definitely my favourite part of the day, especially when a scene like this unfolds in front of you.

Kit Used:
Canon R5 Mark II
Canon RF 28-70mm f/2
NiSi 5-Stop ND (JetMag Pro)

Printed on Fotospeed NST Bright White using my Canon Pro-1100.

Photoshop Just Got a Facelift (First Time in 10 Years)

Photoshop has had a facelift. Not a new tool, not another AI button. The actual look of the thing, the panels and pickers you stare at all day, redrawn for the first time in over a decade.

It's in the beta for now, so if you want a go you'll need to install the Photoshop beta from your Creative Cloud app. A "modern UI" option had been sitting in Technology Previews for a while, but it only touched a handful of dialogs. The real change arrived with beta 27.12.0 at the start of October, and it's carried on through 28 and 28.0.1 since.

Why it looks different, not just rearranged

Adobe are calling this the first phase of a refreshed interface, "the first significant refinement of Photoshop's UI in more than a decade". It's built on Spectrum, their own design system, and the point of it is a Photoshop that's easier to read and sits consistently alongside Lightroom, Bridge and Premiere.

You see it first in the toolbar. There's more space between things, the icons have been redrawn and cleaned up, and the active tool now stands out with stronger contrast so you can tell at a glance what you've got selected. The options bar along the top gets the same treatment. One change you'll notice straight away: tool groups open on hover now, rather than the old click-and-hold with a tiny triangle as the only clue there was more underneath. Not keen? You can turn that bit off in Settings or Preferences > Tools, by unticking "Show Tool Groups on Hover in the toolbar".

The colour picker and adjustments are where you'll feel it

The Colour Picker has changed the most. You now get two rows of recently used swatches under the colour field, pulled from the same recents as your Swatches panel. HSB and RGB are still there, and CMYK has moved into a drop-down on the right. The real benefit is simple: mix a colour, carry on working, then come back to it later and it's sitting right there in your recents.

Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation and the gradient fill layer have all been reworked too. Smoother look, clearer colour cues, better contrast. Here's the part that matters though: they all work exactly as they did before. Nothing has moved in terms of what the sliders actually do. The big visual change is that the old channel and colour-range drop-downs are now rows of little coloured circles. So on Hue/Saturation, for example, the slider tracks are coloured, which means you can see what Hue is about to do before you move anything. Adobe say 24 panels and pickers have had this first-phase treatment in all.

Quick Compare saves you toggling layers

Slightly separate from the new look, and it actually landed a few weeks earlier, is Quick Compare. You'll find it at the bottom of the toolbar, under Quick Mask (the little split rectangle). Click it and Photoshop shows you "before", meaning how the image looked when you opened it this session, against "after". Single view flips between the two. Split view gives you a draggable divider, and zoom and pan both work. Click again to come back out. No more hiding layers or digging through the History panel just to see what you've changed.

Turning it on, and off, takes a couple of clicks

Go to Settings on a Mac, or Edit > Preferences on Windows, then Interface. Right at the bottom there's an Options section with "Enable Modern User Interface". Underneath it is "Enable Modern Color User Interface", which only does anything if the first one is already on. So you can have the new layout on its own, or the new colours as well. Don't get on with it? Same place to switch it all back off.

It's a beta, so expect a few rough edges

A few people on Adobe's own forum have reported teething problems, which is exactly what a beta is for. Some have seen tool flyouts not displaying properly, jumping between the top and bottom tool so you can't reach the ones in the middle (Adobe have that marked as in development). Others have reported the coloured circles showing the wrong colours, or in the wrong order (Adobe's first suggestion there is to reset your beta preferences). A few have found tool groups going back to the first tool on relaunch rather than the last one you used (Adobe's director of product management for Photoshop has replied to say they'll look into it).

My own take? I like it. I like seeing the thing move forward, and it shows there's real work going into a platform I use and love. I've been running it in beta and pre-release, and yes, it takes a bit of getting used to. But once you're familiar with it you're moving just as quickly as before, if not quicker. I'm all for it, and I'm leaving it on.

As for when it lands properly, Adobe haven't officially said. Adobe MAX runs from the 10th to the 12th November, and this is exactly the sort of thing they tend to announce there. I'll let you know the moment I hear, along with anything else from MAX worth knowing about.

So, over to you. When the new look turns up in front of you, are you the sort who'll switch it straight on and get used to it, or will you want it off and stick with the Photoshop you know?

Yesterday I Photographed Stupid

Yesterday I photographed Storm Austen out on the Cobb at Lyme Regis with my mates Ben Kapur and Steve. Healy.

We caught the tail end of it. No strong winds, but the waves were rolling in quite impressively as the high tide peaked. Ben was raised in Lyme, so he knew exactly where we should stand to be out of harms way. The Cobb curves, and there's a spot where the waves just don't reach. Where we stood was completely dry.

So there we were, having a brilliant time photographing the sunset as it lit up the clouds, with the waves crashing hard against the Cobb. Then there were the others. Some folk thought it perfectly sensible to walk the length of the Cobb and stand right at the far end. They ran the gauntlet as the waves crashed against the wall, towered up above them, then came crashing down.

With my mate, Ben Kapur

One person even climbed the steps in the distance and appeared up on top of the Cobb with their dog on a lead. Thankfully they realised it wasn't a good idea and beat a hasty retreat.

So yeah, I photographed Stupid yesterday. Glad to say he got back safely. But has he learned a lesson? I doubt it.

Canon R5 Mark II
Canon RF 14-35mm f/4
f/8
1/2 second exposure
ISO 100
NiSi 6-stop ND filter (JetMag Pro)