MAC Week 4 - Comment 2

Photo by Paul Devoto

Original post from Paul:

As many of you know, there was a lunar eclipse several months ago. I was fortunate enough to be in an area of Northern California where the skies cleared up just an hour or so before the eclipse was set to commence. To make the experience more exciting, the complex I currently live in has a gorgeous open-air walkable roof atop the 6th floor. So I planned for the post-midnight event in the following way.

I did a basic google search for photographing a lunar eclipse. As you would expect, there were thousands of hits, and from the first ten results alone, many of them were incredibly useful. I then modified the search for the specific camera body and lens I was going to use and I found this article. I then jotted down some of the settings suggestions, grabbed my camera, a tripod, and of course a jacket and headed to the roof.

After some practice shots using primarily a method of trial and error, I ended up with several hundred photos. In iPhoto, I picked the ones that turned out the sharpest for the various stages and dragged them onto a Keynote slide. I adjusted the parameters of the Keynote slide to be 3000 pixels wide, and used the shape button to add circles which were then used to crop the moons. Finally, I add a diagonal line (which was later removed) to guide the uppermost tip of each moon in a smooth line.

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My response:

Paul,

This turned out amazing.  I wanted to see the eclipse, but it was cloudy in Ohio that night.

While I was on your Flickr page, I check out some of your other stuff.  I love photos of the fire dancers, the colors are amazing in the one of the poppies, and how did you get that picture of the owl?!

The only problem is that you use Nikon.