Another from the balcony – waiting on the lunar eclipse

Always find a comfortable place to park the tripod. Thats always a good start. For me, thats the patio. When anything “Lunar Related” happens, thats where you usually find me….and with a view like this, can you blame me?

So tonight, within the next hour, I’m told that we are to expect a lunar eclipse.

We the sticks are planted and the D800 is charged and ready for the capture. So what about the settings?

Lets have a look at those shall we….

I did a quick video about that before here, but this is where I am starting tonight…

How to Photograph the moon!

First Step – Grab your camera body and the longest lens you have and pop it on the ole tripod.

Second Step – Camera settings that seem to work well are 100 ISO, F8, and about 250th of a second. Oh yeah, make sure you are in manual and the auto focus is turned off. Unless you are using spot metering, the camera will try to compensate for the dark sky and render a rather nice large glowing blob of over exposed light. Not good….

Step Three – Use the live view and digitally zoom into the moon to manually set your focus and check exposure. If you do not see the detail you want or if the moon seems to bright, raise the shutter speed or check out a smaller aperture like f11 or 16. Again, you should be in manual and that includes staying away from “auto ISO” as well. Shooting in raw is also recommended as you will have a lot more latitude later in post

Step Four – Turn off live view and make your exposure by either using a cable release or using the self timer.

Step Five – Edit, crop, and refine in photoshop or lightroom. Again, shooting with raw should give you a lot more dynamic range to work with.

So here are a couple of quick grabs out of the camera (that is waiting so patiently to capture this event). Both it AND I are hoping for the clouds to clear. We will see!

Captured with the above process as seen un-cropped with a 70 to 200 lens set all the way to 200

 Captured with the above process as seen cropped and tweaked in Photoshop CC with a 70 to 200 lens set all the way to 200

Ill let you know how it all turns out in tomorrows post!

An here is that video I mentioned that I did before. Good luck!

Or watch the video here!