JoJo's Photobox: Moon Over Austin

Tuesday - August 8, 2006

Moon Over Austin

This evening's moon:

[Moon]
Details: 1/60 sec at f/3.5, 200 ISO, 200mm focal length (35mm equiv.)

This evening was one of those times where the moon looked enormous as it rose over the horizon. I got home, grabbed my tripod, and went to work. Those detail listed are "as shot" but I played around with things quite a bit to bring out the details in the moon...which, sadly darkened the sky a lot. The main thing I did was take the exposure way down. I just tweaked the other values a little bit. Fun stuff.

UPDATE (8-9-2006). Cue "Twilight Zone" music. Rick Lee also posted a photo of a moon last night. We both posted hummingbirds on Sunday and then moons last night. Kinda spooky.

UPDATE #2 (8-9-2006, night). I got an email message asking me to show the "un-touched" photo so they could see what I was talking about regarding the exposure. So, here you go:

[Moon]
Details: 1/60 sec at f/3.5, 200 ISO, 200mm focal length (35mm equiv.)

I kinda like being able to see the power lines in the second photo. But, I don't really like all the noise in the sky. And, of course, I really wanted to see the detail in the moon. It's rather sad that the camera can't catch what the eye can see. The sky was actually lighter than you can see in either photo. This shot gets you something close to what the sky actually looked like to my eye when I took the photos:

[Moon]
Details: 2 sec at f/5, 100 ISO, 200mm focal length (35mm equiv.)

In all the images I shot where you can tell how light the sky was, the moon is so bright (and the whisps of clouds so opaque) that no matter how I tweak the settings, you can't see any of the details of the moon. And, those details were clear as can be to the naked eye. That's the magic of the human brain and eye at work together. No way to program all of that into a camera. Heh.

It's all magic, right? Right.

Posted by Joanna at 10:55 PM