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| D600 300mm F/5.6 ISO1250 0.8 sec |
One
thing I like about photography is it is a state of constant learning. There’s always things to experiment and
experiences to learn from, and it will always be like that. Every photography experience I have, I learn
from to improve my photos in the future.
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| D600 300mm F/5.6 ISO1250 1.3 sec |
I
got up nice and early at 5am today to photograph the lunar eclipse/blood
moon. Granted I don’t have a great lens
for that – I was using my Nikon D600 body, with my 28-300 lens. At 300mm zoom, this lens is a slow f/5.6
setting, but those are the tools I have to work with, as I tried to get a good
photo of the eclipse. A much better, and
much more expensive setup would be to have my body mounted to a telescope, or have
a $7000 300mm lens.
I
set up my tripod in a park near my house where I had a view of the moon. I live in a valley and the moon was beginning
to set so it was low on the horizon. I
wanted to minimize the noise so I played with the ISO settings, and mostly left
the camera on aperture priority, of course on the lowest f/5.6 setting at full
300mm zoom. I had noticed in the past
that the light metering tends to blow out some details on the moon from
previous shooting even with center weighting on and focused on the moon, so I
set the manual eV correction at -2.0 so it would underexpose the photo
according to the processor to be able to capture the details better.
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| D600 300mm F/5.6 ISO200 3.0 sec Note the lack of sharpness and the star trail under the moon |
When
I started looking through the photos in Lightroom for the best of the photos, I
started to notice some things. Most of
the photos were 3 second exposures and longer, and most don’t have quite the
details and sharpness that I would like. The best one at the top of this entry is the 0.8 second shot I got while bracketing.
The longer 10 second exposures are completely unuseable. It became apparent that the moon it simply
moves too fast and 3 seconds is too long of an exposure to be able to capture details
on the moon clear enough.. Even stars have a trail at 3 seconds, and the moon
moves quicker than stars.
Next time I attempt to photograph the moon, I
will set the camera to shutter priority, and play around in the ½ sec to 2
second exposure range and crank up the ISO to be able to get quicker
shots. It’s a balance between having a
quick shutter speed to be able to capture details from movement and minimizing
high ISO noise on the camera.
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