I spent way too much time outside tonight trying to capture the lunar eclipse. Sadly after being out for a bit I foolishly set my ISO down to 200 and from that moment on all the subsequent pictures looked like crap. Guess the secret is the higher ISO and just slightly extended shutter speeds.
It never really seemed all the eclipsy to be honest since at no point was the moon not visible. It did take on a neat orange hue though during the eclipse. And while I normally have to set the shutter speed really fast to get a decent moonshot I was really having to extend the shutter speed to past one second in order to capture shots tonight. Which I suspect is why the ISO 200 shots look all blurry since you really don't want to leave the shutter open for too long.
To make matters worse almost as soon as I went outside and took a couple of shots the camera battery jumped from full to half full and then on the next shot to the almost drained. Seriously, would it kill them to actually have the partially drained setting be there for more than one shot? After that there were several instances where it wasn't taking pictures due to low power. So every so often I would extract the battery and do a temporary charge and then put it back in. It's possible all that shuffling around is what caused the later pictures to be blurry and that it had nothing to do with the ISO. I suppose it's possible I accidentally nudged the focus setting putting the battery back in. And it's not like when you're taking pictures you can tell if things are slightly out of focus since everything looks good on the camera's teeny tiny view screen. So instead of decent pictures all I have are excuses and frozen fingers since it was freezing outside and I couldn't actually operate the camera settings with my gloves on, and the gloves I could operate the camera with are so thin it's like I wasn't even wearing them.
10 comments:
I think your pictures look great.
What kind of lens were you using?
... so you really enjoyed the moment then? ;-]
unfortunately it was too cloudy here so the moon was non-existent. rats!
Nice!
Scott: What kind of lens were you using?
My standard one, an 18-200mm VR Nikon, although now that I type that, I don't think I had the VR turned on (although I was using a tripod with a remote, so that should have been about optimal for minimum vibration).
That sounds like a really nice lens. I want to buy the Canon equivalent.
It's a nice lens, but it's pretty bad in low light situations (which became apparent last weekend at the birthday party at Gymini). Works pretty well in combination with my flash though, but in low light and outside of flash range it isn't so great.
I'm going to buy this one. It's the equivalent for Canon, and it got really good reviews, including a review in Pop Photo magazine.
I think you made the right choice to turn the VR off, because it can work against you on a tripod. The hardest part of long sky exposures will be the waviness of the atmostphere...soooo, the cold night worked for you :)
Unfortunately, cold temps kill batteries quickly...so you suffer there.
Still...nice results. You accurately captured the look of the moon...nicely done!! Well worth the loss of feeling in the fingertips :)
Great shots!
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