For pretty much all of North America, there will be a total lunar eclipse next Wednesday night (October 27th). So why am I posting this in the Photography board? Because with some skill, planning, technique, and luck (and no clouds), results like these are possible. I expect to be outside taking photos that night, and I'm thinking some others might be interested in shooting the moon as well.
wow, thats some neat phtotography, although i gotta point out that the middle shot where its red, must have been brightened much more than the others, because the stuff that was previously black, just became red, just for that oen shot, where it would have just been black in the others.
how long of a lens do you think you'd need to get some decent shots of the moon?
With my 300mm zoom I don't think I'll get close enough to make it interresting. But I keep track of solar events and I already plan to be out there. Been chasing meteor showers for years and havn't caught one on film yet. At least the moon holds still, well, relatively speaking.
The max zoom on my camera is 380mm, and I've taken what I'd consider to be decent full-moon shots. It doesn't fill the frame, but manages to resolve quite a bit of detail. It's large enough to for me to use a center-weighted metering for program exposure, but if you don't have as long a lens, you'll want to be out a night or 2 before to take some test shots. You'd think the moon doesn't look that bright, but it's bright enough to easily overexpose and blast out all the details. My better ones were at 380mm, ISO50, f/5, and 1/250s or 1/500s, which was a much darker exposure than I would have expected.
Carl: If you take a look at the info about the totality photos, it says that they were taken with a much longer exposure than the partiality ones. Since it's apparent that that photographer uses film, I'm quite impressed with how he set up and framed the multiple-exposure shots. If I can get this to work, my shots will be heavily layered in photoshop... :)
oooh, I knew this was coming up but didn't know this soon! perhaps I will have to take my girlfriend (And my camera of course ;) ) out to the desert and see if we can't get some shots next to a cactus or some neat landscaping near it, we'll have to see.. thanks for the warning, now I gotta see what time moonrise and sunset times are and plan accordingly :)
It looks like you'll be able to see it, Pierre, but the question is if you want to be up that late. :-) Charts on one of the pages I linked above says that in the GMT+1 time zone, the partial eclipse begins at 2:14AM Oct. 28th and the total eclipse begins at 3:23AM.
Hehe! I like too my bed to go to cool me by looking at the moon during the night... and here in Belgium, the weather in october/november is really too cloudy to have any chance to see the moon... I prefer to see your pics :-)
I have a lunar photo taken with a standard 70 - 300 mm lens -in my gallery- if you want to take a look. Actually the level of detail is quite surprising.
Wow Sam, I had forgotten about that one. I didn't realize you meant it was posted. Yours definitely looks to have turned out better than mine. Excellent shot!
also, the red shadow over the moon is supposedly normal for lunar eclipses if i can remember my astronomy class, i may try to see if i can get some shots i doubt it tho, we always have cloudy nights here
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. --Dorothea Lange
Pierre I don't have any teleconverters yet. I have looked at magnifiers (a kit of three) but I think these only work for macro photography? Am I wrong?
A neat thing to try might be a slight variation of Delusionist’s plan. If you have a telephoto that is 300mm or longer, you can shoot an object, say a cactus, and the moon behind it. If you are far enough away to exceed the DOF, or just stop the lens down sufficiently, the moon will look HUGE in the photo. Possibly up to half of the size of the object. Telephotos have the ability to "compress" scenes, making things in the background look as big, if not bigger than those in the foreground.
I know for instance, most of the touristy postcard photos of Calgary show the mountains right behind the skyline, when in fact they are an hour's drive from the office buildings that they are pictured beside. This is accomplished by shooting the skyline from quite a distance with a 600mm or longer lens. Here is a real small, poor example of the postcard shot I mentioned.
I remember looking through my dad's binoculars when I was young and having fun with that effect. It made my front yard look about as short as everyone elses (we have a rather long driveway up to our house). Then taking the garbage down to the street didn't seem like such a long chore. =)
Here is an old joke that I heard when I was young.
How to capture a crocodile with a binocular, a tweezers and a matchbox?
1) you look upside-down at the crocodile with the binocular
2) as he is very small, you take it with the tweezers
3) you put it in the matchbox... :-)
%#$& ! There are supposed to be thin wispy clouds over my head tonight which I thought would add to anything I got out of it. Instead it is to thick with cover I couldn't prove to you right now that there is a moon up there at all. Somebody better get some good ones.
It's starting, and the clouds are... sorta cooperating. There were some whispy ones going by, but have cleared up for the time being. The radar shows a line coming in, though, so I'm keeping my hopes low. The camera's outside taking a shot each minute while I'm in here warming up. :-p
Will, I tried your suggestion as best I understand it, but I don't think I can stop down the lens far enough. Thanks for the hint, though. It's great to have someone with so much knowledge helping us out.
well i'm sooo disappointed guys... I was hoping to have pictures to post.. I thought.. surely living in the state with the most sunshine in the world and the most cloudless days that I would easily capture some great images... however, we had our 1 night of clouds tonight and the moon was completely obscured for 99.99999% of the eclips :( I got one shot that was slightly out of focus so, I actually got 0 shots.. yup.. a sad night for me! :-P Hope to see some great shots posted by the rest of y'all :) God Bless
Sorry Dreamer, I hope to have a camera capable of such a shot by the next eclipse in 2007. Will you wait that long? Did you get some shots? Where are the shots?
I think I got some fairly good ones, but I'm going to build them into (I hope) a fairly impressive sequence in photoshop. I've had some other things come up, though, and haven't put them together yet.
haha, talking in the third-person again Darryl? The price on the S1 has come way down... NewEgg has them at about $350 right now. But I'm far too attached to mine to ship it to BC! :-D