2020 - August - The Moon
Rules that are always applicable are as follows:
- One photo per answer, and no more than 5 answers per user per contest.
- Post only photos taken by yourself/person with you.
- All entries should include a line of text with the location, subject, and date (specificity is up to you).
- Refrain from posting sensitive/debatable content
- Only upvotes count towards winning.
Rules for August are as follows:
- The Moon - Picture must include the moon.
- The contest will last the whole month of August and to be clear, we use UTC, just like the site itself.
- There is no constraint on when the photo must have been taken.
Suggest a theme for the next contest.
- Leave a single comment below in the format THEME - ONE SENTENCE DESCRIPTION
Good luck!
4 answers
Moon over saguaro
16 Aug 2011, in the White Tank Mountains just west of Phoenix Arizona, 300 mm lens, 6:47 local time.
The moon was nearly full, and low in the west around dawn. I wanted the moon to look as large as possible relative to the cactus, so a long focal length was needed. The 300 mm was the longest I had with me at the time.
It was more tricky to get this picture than it might seem. The moon was too high in the sky so that by the time I got back far enough from a tall cactus, the moon was off the top of the picture. The solution was to find a tall cactus west of a gully. I got this picture by lying on the ground of a dry wash that was maybe 30 feet below the surrounding terrain.
0 comments
If I recall correctly, this was shot hand-held, or possibly with a monopod, because my heavy tripod was in use for the 1100mm lens, to which I had attached an adapter and a telescope eyepiece.
* Well, just past midnight of the 28th if the EXIF metadata is correct.
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2020/08/07, shot from near Ottawa, ON. Canon Rebel T6 with 55-250 lens @ 180mm, ISO 100, f/18, 1/6 second
Not the first "just the moon" photo posted here by any means, but certainly the first decent picture of the moon that I've taken (previous attempts when my only camera was a phone were... less than stellar).
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Obligatory shot of just the moon
Yup, it's the moon. I included this to document the exposure. Getting the moon right is tricky, since it's a small but bright object in the middle of a dark background. Anything with auto-exposure is going to mess this up, unless you have a very long lens so that the moon fills much of the frame.
This picture was one of a series of exposure tests. The brightest parts of the moon were near, but not past, the top end of the sensor range. The parameters were:
ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/125 second
5 Mar 2010 at 19:24, Groton Massachusetts, 300 mm lens, full frame (36 x 24 mm) sensor, cropped result.
1 comment
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looney_11_rule which puts the exposure within 20% of this.
7 comments
I'm looking forward to this. I love night-sky photos but my attempts there are always poor. — Monica Cellio 6 months ago
@MonicaCellio ... if only there was some website where you could ask questions to improve your night sky photography >_< — Hueco 5 months ago
@Hueco true. I feel like such a clueless beginner next to the folks here, but I could ask anyway. I mean, I'm using a cell phone... — Monica Cellio 5 months ago
@Monica: Cell phone cameras have come a long way from the toys they were just a decade ago. However, sky photography usually requires careful manual settings, which are often not available on something dumbed down with low intimidation factor being the highest design criterion. Asking about night sky photography with dumbed down equipment might make a good question here. — Olin Lathrop 5 months ago
You're not going to get a good photo of Luna with a mobile phone because their optics are configured for wide angle shots, but you might be able to get a nice landscape with the moon in the background. — Peter Taylor 5 months ago