Earlier this year we had a blood moon and I had no interest in intentionally waking up in the middle of the night since someone was doing that for me... A few months and one moon photo shoot failure later - I was more than happy to wake myself up at 2am! Matt on the other hand, was unimpressed enough by the first one that he didn't want me to wake him up. :(
Happily, my furry babies were super excited to hang out with their mom while she tried to once again figure out photographing the moon! After a rough start of finding a hat and gloves in the dark, we were ready to go. I played with my zoom, shutter speed and focus until my fingers were a little numb and I think the photos show an improvement. (Except for the photo that took while I was tripping over my tripod, but that's on par for my klutziness...)
Ta-da! The Blood Moon:
I think I did a pretty good job on the shots! Still not able to zoom in super close like I'd prefer, but I think I'll need a longer lens for that. I managed to get the focus better thanks to reading up on moon photography - apparently the moon moves faster than you would think so a faster shutter speed was necessary. Plus the shorter shutter speed keeps the stars looking like points in space.
Granted, you can't see the stars in that photo because the settings are keyed in to the moon. So I decide to do a little photo manipulation to show you both:
Pretty cool, huh? I used a radial filter on the moon to keep it the way I wanted, then upped the exposure outside the filter so you could see the stars. Matt teases me about photos not being "real" once I start messing with filters, but I always argue that I want the photo to look like what I saw. And that is what I saw at 2 in the morning.
It really was a perfectly clear night for the blood moon. :)
Next on the list of night photography - star trails! If only the forecast would show something other than the dreaded "cloudy"...