Camera Talk

The full moon rose gloriously this evening, despite the smoke from the wildfires blazing at Fort Huachuca, just 25 miles away. I hope that this year isn't a repeat of the Monument Fire of 2011.

lovely




we had a blood moon down here'i have literally just come back from shooting ...will post once i get son post process out of the way

Very nice, Dennis. I imagine exposure was pretty tricky. Is this full-frame digital? I'd like to see a big print of number one.
--- James

Martolod, I look forward to seeing your blood moon shots. I had intended to stay awake to see the total eclipse last night, but I slept instead.

James, these shots were taken with the full-frame Nikon D700 and 24-85mm/3.5-4.5 zoom. I love this combination! I have learned from experience that I have to use exposure compensation for shots of the moon. On nights like last night, with the moonrise about 20 minutes before sunset, I subtracted 0.3 stops. When the moon rises later with respect to sunset, I subtract as much as a full stop to make the photo similar to what my eye sees. (This is with matrix metering set in the camera.)

The wildfire is now burning more than 400 acres of the Coronado National Forest, still uncontrolled. Looking on a map, I now see that the fire is much closer than I originally estimated, about 12-15 miles from my home. The smoke might make for some good color in the sunset and moonrise tonight. (I'm just trying to put a positive spin on a bad fire situation!)

I appreciate your comments, as always. Comments are few and far between.

Dennis, your moon shots get better every time - practice makes perfect. We missed the blood moon because of cloud, so I couldn't even try!

Beautiful dusk shots, Dennis. I like most the first one, with the moon just separating the two colored areas of the sky.

In these situations the moon is so much brighter than anything else that it appears as a small white disk, instead of the large textured orb that we perceive with naked eye. Some years ago I got so bored with the technical dilemma that I used to cheat with moon shots doing double exposures, a tele for the moon, exposing for the bright object, and then the landscape with a normal or wide. I tried to get the large moon image just over the tiny moon that the normal lens was seeing. Sometimes I would save the moon image for another landscape and use a red filter to blacken the sky in the second exposure.

Should be much easier with digital and Photoshop these days.

Blood moon here was about 4-5 AM, not a civilized hour for photography.