Project 365: April 21, 2008

Low red moon. Except that it looked a lot lower and a lot redder and a lot bigger with my eyeballs than with my Blackberry camera.

Back Yard Adventures

Hung out in my back yard around sunset this evening. This is my favorite time of year, weather-wise: 70-ish and just gorgeous. Fall leaves come down too quickly for my taste, and this year I hope to get out and get some photos as things change color. Unfortunately, it's been such a weird late summer/early fall that some trees are losing their leaves without them having changed colors. Kind of bizarre.

In this picture, I was trying to capture the sky, which looked a lot more dramatic in real life than I was able to portray with my camera. I tried various white balance settings, to no avail. I'm facing east, and the sun is setting to the west directly across from my subject. It made some neat colors in the clouds. This shot has been cropped quite a bit, and I cloned out an annoying golf hole flag.



And a semi-low semi-red moon tonight - 98% full, waning gibbous. This wasn't the most crisp shot I got, but it showed the color of the moon the best. The red only lasted a few minutes, and after that it was just like any other moon...



Earlier in the afternoon, I caught a shot of a great egret flying over the pond in my back yard. Unfortunately, I had bumped my camera dial (apparently) and it was set to Manual mode (and the last thing I'd shot was the moon!) - so the shutter speed was way too slow. The photo was grossly over exposed, but I kicked down the exposure 4 stops in Lightroom and then messed with color levels a bit. This is what I got:



There's some camera shake around his wings, but it looks more like an indication of motion to me than a blur. I cropped the photo a bit, as there was originally more room on the right and I wanted to give the guy some room to fly into. I wish I had been outdoors when I took this shot - I was indoors behind a window. I kind of like it, particularly the position of the bird and the bit of shadow beneath him. I don't much like how the bank of the pond behind him looks.

Here's a question for the masses: are the effects of camera shake acceptable if they add to the movement of the subject in the photo?

(I can't say I'm sure that's the case here, but I think it's at least arguable!)

Howl at the Moon

Yep, more moon shots.

I was driving home tonight as saw the coolest red moon hanging low in the sky. I broke a few traffic laws to try and get home as fast as I could (hey, they're meant to be guidelines, right?), but couldn't get home fast enough to catch the wicked red shade. By the time I grabbed my camera and got outside, it was more yellowish than anything.

These shots were hand-held with my 70-300mm lens (which has image stabilization). To try and avoid the street lights, I drove down the road a bit and took these from a spot away from street lights. I was only a half mile or so from home, though, so there was still (sadly) plenty of skyline/ambient light. I thought it might help a bit with the noise to get away from the houses. It doesn't seem to have helped much.

On the ones colored au naturale, I increased the blacks one notch in Lightroom to counteract the noise. On the others, I left them unprocessed (except for cropping) and switched to grayscale mode.

This moon is waning gibbous with 86% of the Moon's visible disk illuminated.

Lunar Eclipse Photos

Last night, when I went to bed, I had decided that I was too tired to try and wake up in the middle of the night to view and photograph the total lunar eclipse, which was scheduled to go total at 4:52am. I fell sound asleep, until my cat started puking on my bed at 4:25am. Coincidence? I figured, at that point, since I'd already gotten out of bed to clean up cat puke, I might as well take the tripod outside and photograph the eclipse....

Here are a few of the pictures I got. I think I figured out the source of the noise in my blacks. It has got to be the bright street lights that backlight me. There is one bright light 2 doors down from my driveway, and many others lining my street. The longer exposures were doing well to enhance the moon, but the noise in the blacks would get worse and worse. It's practically like shooting in daylight, the street lights are so close by and so bright. So, I'm figuring that is it. Unfortunately, unlike my first quarter moon shots, upping the black levels in the photos obscures part of the shadowed moon, so you'll just have to live with the noise and not zoom in too close :) I didn't crop most of these, for that reason.

My general settings were:

Camera:	Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Exposure:	0.8 sec (4/5)
Aperture:	f/5.6
Focal Length:	300 mm
ISO Speed:	200
Exposure Bias:	0/3 EV
Flash:	Flash did not fire

. Click any of them to see larger ones in Flickr, or view the set at Flickr.

The first 4 photos are the partial eclipse, and the last 2 are after the total eclipse:







Exactly 4:52am, the start time of the total eclipse:


4:53am

Lunar Eclipse Tonight

There's a lunar eclipse tonight. Where I live, the total eclipse will run from 4:52am to 6:23am. See the Sky and Telescope web site for details.

I've got a long day at work tomorrow, but I'm quite tempted to try and photograph this....

The Moon - Take Two!

I shot the moon again tonight. Turns out, the best picture I got was using the settings from this moon photography article, but kicked up to ISO200 instead of 100. From the couple hundred shots I took, here's what I found:

• Anything over ISO200 generates way too much noise, so much that the outline of the moon is affected and it becomes pretty much unfixable.
• Sunny f/16 doesn't catch enough light (f/16 and 1/00 or 1/125 shutter speed) - at least not at the first quarter moon. Maybe it would work for a full moon. Someday I'll try it.
  
• Manual mode is a necessity, at least with my lens. Shutter priority wanted an aperture of 5.6, and none of those shots turned out. Aperture priority was calculating 30 second shutter times - obviously way too long.
  
• Metering mode didn't seem to affect anything. I need to read up on this again.
  
• Auto exposure bracketing was helpful. Tonight, I set it to 2 stops either way.
  
• I removed the polarizer filter tonight and got much better shots than the other day.

I had much brighter shots tonight (due to removal of the polarizer filter?), and by increasing the blacks one notch in Lightroom, I was able to get rid of all that weird green noise. (It didn't work as well on my shots from the other day, as they weren't as bright and there was more noise in them). So - in the end, for both of these photos, I notched up the blacks by 1 or 2 to get rid of the noise in the blacks, and cropped them. I could probably even crop them further, but I like a little bit of darkness around them.


Exposure: 0.067 sec (1/15)
Aperture: f/16
Focal Length: 300 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Exposure Bias: 0/3 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire


Exposure: 0.01 sec (1/100)
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 300 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Exposure Bias: 2 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire

Hoorah for the moon! I think I like the first one better. Its detail seems finer. Thoughts?

Find the Moon

If you'd like to try your hand at shooting the moon, here are some resources to help you plan your moonshot.

Photographer's Astronomy - Input your location, and this tool will show you where to find the moon in the sky, as well as the moonrise and moonset times (amongst other things).

US Navy Complete Sun and Moon Data for One Day - simple sun and moon rise and set times.

Moon Phase calculator - shows a calendar of the moon phases for every day of the month, so you can plan to get the phase of the moon that you're looking for.

Crude attempt to fix the moon

Well, I've made a crude attempt to fix the moon. It's definitely not a keeper, but the practice is good for me. I need to pick up a book on post-production with Photoshop and Lightroom. I working with the trial of Lightroom right now, but I think I will end up buying it. I already have Photoshop, but it seems like overkill a lot of the time.

I converted the moon picture to grayscale, hoping that would get rid of the noise. It didn't, nor did noise reduction. So I filled the background with black. I lost a lot of detail in the moon in the process, and the outline looks a bit crude and unnatural. I'm sure there are better ways to fix this photo - I just haven't learned them yet!

I plan to take another shot at the moon ASAP, using a faster shutter speed.

First Try at Moon Shots

I took my first shot at moon photos tonight. I checked out the Shooting the Moon thread on the DPS Forums, as well as this Lunar Photography Exposure Guide (scroll down a little for the chart).

The moon in my area tonight is a day off of the first quarter moon, so according to the chart, at ISO100 and f/16, the shutter speed should be about 1/15. (The moon is not full, thus the longer shutter speed, instead of the sunny f/16 rule, which would be 1/100 shutter speed).

I shot with a tripod and a shutter release cable, and a polarizing filter (can't remember which article I read that in - to prevent over-exposure). I also set auto exposure bracketing, so I was snapping 3 shots at a time. Manual focus.

All shots were taken at 300mm.

Of the shots I kept, most were either taken at f/16 and 1/15, or f/8 and 1/15 or 1/20.

When I cropped the shots, though, all of them had this greenish speckling in the black areas. What is that? From too much light? Should I have used a faster shutter speed?

Is there any way I can get rid of it in Photoshop to salvage any of these shots?

I'll definitely try again, but would appreciate any feedback from anyone who can tell from my shots what I've done wrong this time :)

Several more shots (including uncropped ones) are here.

Thanks!!!!



Exposure: 0.077 sec (1/13)
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 300 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 2/3 EV