But alas ... when Monday's rare Full (or Super) Blood Wolf Moon arrived, I felt compelled to give it another try ... even though I long ago passed down my Canon 70-300mm to one of my sons, and I haven't added a lens with a longer reach. And even though the temperatures in Raleigh were a bone-chilling 20ish. Or so it seemed.
The lenses with the longest focal distances in my gear today are a Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD (far superior to the Canon 70-300, I might add) and a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS. The Canon 70-200 converts to a 98-280mm f/4 when I attach my 1.4 extender, so it gives me almost the same distance as my Tamron at the far end. (Note: I gave photographing the wolf moon no advance thought that would have given me time to rent a lens with longer reach. My bad.)
But even in the immediacy of my decision to tackle the shoot, I was aware of this dilemma: The Canon lens and extender would gain me two wider apertures at the longest distance once refractive light on the moon disappeared entirely. It would just be significantly heavier to lift and hold steady without using a tripod (the moon was directly overhead, making the use of a tripod physically awkward and cumbersome, something I didn't want to deal with in the frigid cold).
Both long-range lenses have several stops' worth of camera-steadying (stabilization) protection, so I decided to rely on the built-in steadying help to justify hand-holding my shots even at the point when I knew I'd need to boost ISO, open the aperture and reduce shutter speed as the eclipse increasingly removed refracative light from the moon's surface.
It was about 11:10 p.m. Sunday -- when the eclipse was already more than a quarter of the way started -- when I impulsively decided to photograph the event. I'd seen the full moon earlier in the evening while running an errand, and I wish I'd taken a shot of it then so I'd have a start point, or "base," image, but ... I didn't. Oops. My bad again.
Anyway, at 11:10, I reached for my Canon 6D. The Tamron lens (now my walk-around lens) was already on the camera, so I went with it to see what I would get.
I set the shooting mode to manual and picked 1/125, f/13 and ISO 250 for my settings. (Strangely, my previous lunar photography experience -- long ago as it was -- rushed to me pretty accurately as I pondered where to start). My first shot was on pretty much on target, which doesn't happen very often. It's the image you see above. Well, on target as much as a partial moon shot goes. I was getting none of the eclipsed red stuff just yet. Still, I liked what I was seeing so I continued with these settings for a while.
When I looked at the LCD monitor to see the image, I knew I'd have to crop it some to give it any decent size, and that's what you see above. It's been cropped significantly. But the impressive factor was that I saw no fringe "waves" around the circumference, which I'd seen in those images shot in the long-ago attempts using inferior glass. If the Tamron would have had more reach, it would have scored very high marks in my opinion.
I kept the same settings for the next phase (first below), which I took about 10 minutes after the one above, and for the next phase (second below), which was another 10 minutes. I tweaked the lighting slightly on the second one in post-processing because I was losing detail as the surface light thinned to near nothing.
At 11:55 p.m., I was almost bereft of surface refractive light. Knowing I needed more exposure, I switched lenses. On went the Canon 70-200 with the 1.4 extender (giving me 280mm). After a couple of tests at various settings, I settled on pushing the aperture to the maximum f/4, reducing the shutter to 1/80 and boosting the ISO to 8000. On my Canon 6D, I consider ISO 6400 my threshold for acceptable noise, so I knew I'd have noise to contend with when I put the last images through post-processing. But I also knew I'd start seeing full surface and some red.
My first shot with the Canon lens at 11:55 is the first image below. As you can see, because I was now getting exposure on the full surface of the moon at the "faster" settings, I was also now seeing the red that I wasn't getting on the images taken above. On the far left, there's just a hint of the last refractive light before total eclipse.
I didn't return for what would my final shots -- i.e., at full eclipse -- until 12:22 a.m., and that's when I grabbed the shot you see leading off the post. By this time, with no refractive surface light to see anywhere, I struggled to find focus on the sphere even when using manual mode. So it isn't as naturally sharp as I wanted. I usually wouldn't lead off a post with an image I consider of less than optimum basic quality (such as sharpness), but I think given the circumstances here, I don't have to be too apologetic.
Because of the 8000 ISO, I put both the picture above and leading off the post in Noiseware software during post-processing to see if that might help diminish some of the distraction. It helped the 11:55 p.m. shot above a little, but not much at all on the 12:22 a.m. shot leading off the post.
After taking the 12:22 shot, I called it a night. And a shoot.
As always, click on any image to bring up a larger and sharper (in most cases!) version.
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