Shoot for the Moon
The wake up alarm went off at 1am this morning. I was wondering why Lane would have set it for this time. I’d initially forgotten that there was going to be a lunar eclipse, also known as a Super Blood Moon, which was going to happen in moments. It’s 1:11am, here in Hawaii, to be precise. Hawaii is also the only state in the US to be able to see super blood moon this time around.
It turned out to be a super easy mission to view the moon because as soon as we walked down the stairs from our apartment, there it was at about 1 o’clock in the sky. Even better were the numerous nearby palm trees about the place. Better still again was the presence of virtually no wind, which is very important when shooting very slow shutter-speeds of palm trees. It only takes a couple of knots of wind to get palm tree fronds moving, usually.
I didn’t even plan to shoot it. I was just admiring the view and thinking to myself, “I should take a couple of pictures, so I grabbed my Canon 5D MK4 which has superb focusing and file creation on dark subjects.
Had I been using a tripod, my exposures might have been in the 20 or 30 second realm but I didn’t feel the need for it, so what I did instead was to set my camera’s ISO to 6400 ISO. This allowed me to use much shorter shutter times of just 1/8th of a second to 2 seconds.
Normally, you would still need a tripod even for these exposures, but I employed the use of a quite small bean bag ad I leant my camera against the beanbag, against a tree, then fired a few frames each time to get just one sharp one. Who’d have thunk? Astrophotography handheld. This was the best pic that I took of last night’s super blood moon.
I have previously photographed another super blood moon, a few years ago, but unlike this picture, the palm fronds were completely unlit by nearby street lamps, resulting in a silhouette effect with the palm fronds.
Though, I quite like both images, I’m not entirely sure which one I prefer of these two. I welcome your feedback on that.
Aloha,
Sean
