The frustration of us photographers sometimes is when you’re on location, set everything up and spend hours waiting only to see the sun rise behind clouds, or there are no clouds at all and the sunrise is really bland.
It’s also why photography is so exciting. It requires a good amount of patience. And when you get rewarded from time to time, you really appreciate it.
I had one of those moments when I was in the garden, setting up my gear, waiting for the lunar eclipse. It was supposed to start at 11.30pm and finish at around 2.30am. So that’s 3 hours of waiting if you want to capture the whole thing.
So I was standing in the garden like a statue for 2 hours and just before we had the full lunar eclipse with the moon turning red, a huge cloud field moved in and completely covered the moon. It was literally 15 minutes before it would have happened.
So the result was a very unhappy Kajo with not much to show for in terms of photos. Oh well the next chance I will have will be in 2014!!
It’s part of photography and while it’s frustrating, there’s nothing I enjoy more than being out in nature trying to capture her at her finest.
Here is one of the shots I took that night with the earth’s shadow already creeping across the moon (100% crop):
I shot with my trusty Nikon D2H and 80-200 f/2.8 lens. I also added a 1.7x TC (also Nikon) to get extra reach. I really wanted that moon to be nice and big. Effectively I had a 340mm lens. Not bad on a cropped sensor (which corresponds to roughly a 500mm lens on a full frame).
I shot at pretty high ISO and fairly wide open. Shutter speed is important, because the moon moves and if you want a razor sharp moon, you have to have a fast shutter speed.
So ISO was at 800 and aperture at f/5.6. This gave me a shutter speed of about 1/125sec. That’s plenty for what I was going for.
Below is a shot of the setup I used.
