moon photos

Remember way back on March 19th when there was a full moon?  Well I had heard that it was closer than it had been in a long time and that it would appear 14% larger and 30% brighter than a normal full moon.  So I got out my tripod and decided to try taking pictures of it.

The only problem was that it was really cloudy.  So while there was nothing to take pictures of, I took the picture above, trying to get some of my settings right for night-time shots.  (That's looking in my window;)

The settings for night photography are so different than what I'm used to!  I know I still have a lot to learn, but it was pretty humbling to try to get shots of the moon.  And it was frustrating because the clouds would part and I'd have a minute or so to fool around with my settings and snap away.  And my hands were freezing and finally I went inside to get a flashlight so I could actually look at my camera while I was trying to figure it out in this new way.  I don't know how many pictures I took.  This one is overexposed, but I thought it still looked pretty cool.



Then I switched my white balance and took my flash exposure comp all the way down to -5!  I got one picture before the clouds overtook the moon:

The clouds never gave way again.  So the next night I wanted to try it one more time with what I learned.  I went out to the corner of my property because the trees were in the way, but then the horse across the street was totally freaked out by all my little beeping noises.  I thought she was going to jump over the fence and trample me.  So I went to the other end of my property as far away as I could get from her and took some more pix.  I'm not sure how I could have made them better, but I'm sure I could have some how.



When I got them on my computer, I noticed that I took a series of shots without moving the tripod in under a minute and it was crazy how much the moon traveled in that short amount of time.  So I did a multiple exposure of them in Picasa:



And when my son saw that, he told me I had to blog about it.  (Which I thought was funny for a 9 year old to say.) 

I love a good full moon.