Hobos Landing

Shoot The Moon

There was a gorgeous moon out last night so I drove to the front of the ranch with camera to get a shot. I’ve enjoyed shooting the moon for a couple of years now, but had great trouble capturing it early on. The problem stems from I (and my camera) tried to approach this as if I was shooting in the dark, but from an exposure point of view, I’m not. This shot was taken at f14, 1/320th ISO 800 with the white balance set for daylight. I used a cheap Sigma 70-300 lens that I normally use to shoot motocross. I had the camera on a tripod, but I have gotten decent ones hand held. I took some that I still have to process at f32 which I am hoping will be sharper.

It took some research and experimentation to figure out that even though it’s dark outside, when you photograph a nice moon, you are capturing bright, reflected sunlight, and there is a surprisingly large amount. The problem is the camera meter sees a WHOLE LOT of dark around this one bright spot. Consequently, you HAVE to shoot it fully manual, including focus. It’s impossible for the focusing system to gather enough data to do it’s job, so you have to do it for it.

I think I might time out a future moon night and rent a 500mm L glass and see if I can really do it justice.

These past few days I have been shooting Project 365 shots that are not related at all.  Here are some examples:

Yellow Moon

Jade Bolo

The Web

Yellow Tea Pot

The clouds blew over so I decided to brave the cold and go back out for one last set of blue moon shots.

All Blues

These are for my friend, Linwood.  I think he would probably enjoy them.

Blue Moon on New Years Eve

According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month.

Moon In The Clouds

A full moon occurs every 29.5 days, and most years have 12. On average, an extra full moon in a month — a blue moon — occurs every 2.5 years. The last time there was a lunar double take was in May 2007. New Year’s Eve blue moons are rarer, occurring every 19 years. The last time was in 1990; the next one won’t come again until 2028.

How Blue Can You Get

Peeking

Timeless In Blue

I haven’t done a moon photo in a while and this one reminded me of the Rodgers and Hart class:

Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

Blue Moon

Nope, sorry…this post doesn’t have anything to do with the great band, ‘Living Color’.  It’s just lil old me experimenting with colors.

Who says the moon isn’t made of green cheese?

I’ve been taking quite a few pictures of the moon lately and have posted some on flickr.  Unfortunately, pictures of the moon get kinda old really quick, so I am just gonna bore everyone one last time with the latest one.  I think it turned out really well.

I’ve been trying to get a halfway decsent picture of the moon and I finally kinda got one.

For the photo curious only: I tried for about an hour to get a shot and was just getting big orange fuzzy blobs.   My mistake was in thinking that the camera knew the exposure better than I would.  (This is one of the few times this has happened)  I was using every auto priority thingy that it had.  Aperture, shutter speed, full auto, etc.  I had looked at exposure settings of other pictures of the moon and they weren’t even close to what the camera was telling me, so I finally set it to full manual and dialed in what I wanted and it worked!  For reference, it’s shot at ISO 1600, shutter speed was 1/160 and the aperture is f11.