Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse Photography

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.

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.

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.

Open Letter to Ontario Parks – Why is your firewood always so shitty?

Ontario Parks,

You are the largest car camping provider in Ontario by default.  5 million camper nights visit your parks every year and you have been operating parks for over 100 years. I would think that by now you would have people with the knowledge, skillsets and ability to procure dry, properly seasoned firewood to sell at the parks by now.  Yet year after year, the firewood you sell at the parks is poor quality and continues to disappoint myself and hundreds of thousands of other park visitors per year.  In your 2012 car camping survey, a whopping 43% of the survey respondents indicated that the quality of the firewood Ontario Parks sells is unacceptable:

Unfortunately it is clear that no action has been taken by Ontario Parks to remedy this situation.

On a recent trip to Algonquin Park we bought several bags of extremely wet wood out of a trailer from Ontario Parks.  It was close to being the worst firewood I have ever purchased.  The wood was extremely wet.  I am not a novice fire starter by any means, but it took about 8 tries to get the fire started.  Newspaper would not start it even with the wood chopped down to matchstick and chip sizes.  We needed to use cottonballs soaked in Vaseline I usually use for backcountry fire lighting.  In fact it was so wet, we had to chop the majority up into pieces of kindling to get it to burn and sustain burning, even with the fire established.  We had to grill/dry the yet to be burned pieces on the campfire grill just to get some moisture out for it to burn. 

Luckily our camp neighbor came by our site and lent us his splitting axe for this task.  I would say that with the (lack of) quality wood I used at that park on that day, over 90% of the people who would try to use this would either not have had the skills or equipment to get a fire started using it.

There’s no excuse for this, especially in Algonquin Park.  There’s… um… 7,630 square kilometers of park that forestry companies log the crap out of.  Surely a miniscule portion of the hardwood that is harvested from this area could be properly seasoned and sold as firewood within the park.

Really, it’s not rocket science to properly season wood.  In case you don’t know how to do it, someone just has to split the wood and keep the wood under a covered, dry location for a year or two for it to dry out and season properly before selling it.  The key is it has to be stored in a dry location, which apparently not many of the firewood contractors you get wood from know how to do.  Why can’t you hold the contractors accountable for this… are you going for the lowest bid contractor to maximize margins on the rather expensive wood you sell?  The park employee at the campground gate was blaming the horrible wood condition on the wood being green wood, saying that the firewood contractor is changed every year so it is always green wood, but that wasn’t the case. I know green wood when I see it-this was just wet, improperly stored wood.  The park employee also said that it has been the same way year after year as well.  And it seems like this is the case in many other parks I have visited in the past. To be fair, some of the wood I have purchased in some Ontario Park locations is dry and good burning wood, but I would have to say the majority of the cases it is not.

Providing horrible quality firewood at expensive prices at your parks not only takes away from visitors’ camping experience enjoyment, but also encourages them to bring their own dry firewood from home or other locations which I’m sure you would not want in some locations due to the ash borer as well.

Please sort this out and get a plan to provide proper quality firewood to all your park locations.

Regards,

Outdoorjay

Someone else’s link: Bad Firewood from Ontario Parks
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