Archive for December 11th, 2017
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It’s National Have a Bagel Day, in these United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As much as I enjoy a good dystopian nightmare, a humble narrator is somewhat ready to shut the doors and lock the windows these days. Sheesh. “Best thing to do is lose yourself in work” and ignore everything else I always say, which is why one recently found himself perched on his porch with a tripod mounted camera while the so called supermoon hung squamously in the cloud stained skies of western Queens. The thing that drew me to set up the entire rig was actually the presence of the fast moving atmospheric system, rather than the presence of the satellite itself. The aural light passing through the clouds was just fantastic.
If I actually had a brain in my head, I would have shot some video of it as well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is the time of year when one feels as if he’s running at full speed but not making any headway. The tyranny of the now, the banal, and the pedantic is let loose. I owe everyone something, but the concurrence of an empty pocketbook and a complete inability to get anything substantial started – let alone delivered – means that all are disappointed.
The winter of my discontent has arrived. Bah.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The moon shots in today’s post, since I know someone is going to ask, were gathered with the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod and outfitted with a 300mm lens. The first shot was gathered at ISO 500, f.9, and a 1.3 second exposure (I wanted the clouds to “shmear”). For the one directly above, the rig was set to ISO 800, at f7.1, and the exposure was .3 of a second. The usual problems encountered with a bright moon, dark sky, and the counter movements of both planet and moon, and the quickly blowing clouds were all calculated into the equations above.
Procedure demands that you first do a few test shots of a scenario like the one pictured in today’s post to find the right exposure triangle(s), then you need to reorient the camera to where the Moon is going to be in a few minutes rather than where it was while you were doing your test shots. Remember that the moon is moving quite a bit faster through the sky than the naked eye would suggest, but you find that out fairly quickly while looking down a telephoto “soda straw.”
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