Tonight's Lunar Eclipse
For a change, the weather in my neck of the woods cooperated with an astronomical event! That alone is a rarity. Even more surprising is that my health cooperated as well! The chances of all of this coming together were slim.
I had set up a couple of my cameras earlier in the day. I charged and tested batteries. I chose two lenses... one for each camera. I chose the appropriate tripod head and mounted it on my tripod. Then, I waited.
Sheila's parents stopped by for a few drinks before dinner which was nice and occupied my time as we waited for nightfall.
We ate dinner, cleaned up and then I noticed the full moon was brightly lighting up the sky outside our living room window. At this point, I was running low on energy so, rather than hauling all this gear outdoors to a good viewing spot, I just set up the tripod at the living room window and shot out the open window.
The problem with shooting from this particular window is that I knew that the moon would eventually skirt behind a tree. I didn't have the energy to find a better and more appropriate location so I stayed put in the house.
I had one camera on a tripod and I used the other camera handheld. The camera on the tripod was primarily to be used for the darker photos during the full eclipse. I had a remote to use so I didn't need to touch the camera other than for focusing. I also had my Kindle Fire tablet to use as a larger remote with a nice big display. Both of those options worked well.
I managed to shoot a few hundred photos before the moon was beginning to get obscured by the big tree outside the window. At this point, the moon was only five minutes from totality but I'd had enough of shooting at this point and my back was killing me so I called it a night.
Full moons are always my least favorite phase of the moon to shoot. The light is flat with no shadows and it is entirely too bright. The full moon is such a contrasty scene that it is very difficult to shoot well and very few people do.
This was my first attempt at shooting an eclipse so I had some experimenting to do. I was constantly adjusting settings and resetting my focus manually. I found that focusing on the very darkened, reddish eclipsed moon was quite difficult... especially considering I needed to focus manually. It was so dark that I needed to use some very odd settings at very high sensitivities. This always complicates getting crisp images and tonight was no exception but my results were still quite good.
I'll need to check all my settings again by looking at the data embedded in my images but I think the brightness of this scene dimmed to only approximately one tenth of the brightness of the full moon at the beginning of the sequence of photos! Dropping to 1/10th the amount of light is a tremendous range of exposure settings!
Below is a quick composite of three phases of the eclipse... at the bottom left is the full supermoon... at the center is the full moon partially eclipsed.... and then at the top right is the full moon just a few minutes shy of maximum eclipse.
Considering this was my first attempt at shooting a lunar eclipse, I think these images and especially this quick composite came out very well!
I had set up a couple of my cameras earlier in the day. I charged and tested batteries. I chose two lenses... one for each camera. I chose the appropriate tripod head and mounted it on my tripod. Then, I waited.
Sheila's parents stopped by for a few drinks before dinner which was nice and occupied my time as we waited for nightfall.
We ate dinner, cleaned up and then I noticed the full moon was brightly lighting up the sky outside our living room window. At this point, I was running low on energy so, rather than hauling all this gear outdoors to a good viewing spot, I just set up the tripod at the living room window and shot out the open window.
The problem with shooting from this particular window is that I knew that the moon would eventually skirt behind a tree. I didn't have the energy to find a better and more appropriate location so I stayed put in the house.
I had one camera on a tripod and I used the other camera handheld. The camera on the tripod was primarily to be used for the darker photos during the full eclipse. I had a remote to use so I didn't need to touch the camera other than for focusing. I also had my Kindle Fire tablet to use as a larger remote with a nice big display. Both of those options worked well.
I managed to shoot a few hundred photos before the moon was beginning to get obscured by the big tree outside the window. At this point, the moon was only five minutes from totality but I'd had enough of shooting at this point and my back was killing me so I called it a night.
Full moons are always my least favorite phase of the moon to shoot. The light is flat with no shadows and it is entirely too bright. The full moon is such a contrasty scene that it is very difficult to shoot well and very few people do.
This was my first attempt at shooting an eclipse so I had some experimenting to do. I was constantly adjusting settings and resetting my focus manually. I found that focusing on the very darkened, reddish eclipsed moon was quite difficult... especially considering I needed to focus manually. It was so dark that I needed to use some very odd settings at very high sensitivities. This always complicates getting crisp images and tonight was no exception but my results were still quite good.
I'll need to check all my settings again by looking at the data embedded in my images but I think the brightness of this scene dimmed to only approximately one tenth of the brightness of the full moon at the beginning of the sequence of photos! Dropping to 1/10th the amount of light is a tremendous range of exposure settings!
Below is a quick composite of three phases of the eclipse... at the bottom left is the full supermoon... at the center is the full moon partially eclipsed.... and then at the top right is the full moon just a few minutes shy of maximum eclipse.
Considering this was my first attempt at shooting a lunar eclipse, I think these images and especially this quick composite came out very well!
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