Lunar Showmanship

You know, it wasn't all that long ago that we had a lunar eclipse. One of the advantages of blogging is that you can search your archives to find things like that, and according to my blog, we just had one on August 27th of last year (here's the blog entry for that one).

Last night was a little different though. It happened at a time of the evening when I could watch it, and it happened at a time when I had a brand new camera setup to take pictures of it with!

I didn't get to see the very beginning of it. Suzie was over and at 6:45-ish was just leaving to head to her photography class. I was just telling her, "Be sure to bring up the eclipse in your class" thinking maybe they could go outdoors for a "field trip" photo session or something. She walked out and came right back in.
"Look at it now!" she exclaimed, motioning me outside.

It was cool. The earth's shadow was just to the point of covering the entire moon. Only a tiny sliver of brightness was visible. By the time I got out there with my camera it was all shadow--Kind of a dull orange/yellow thing going on. I put my long 75-300 zoom lens on and mounted the camera on the tripod. I spent the next couple hours going outside and snapping pictures at various settings. As with anything like this, some came out good, some not so good. Here are a couple of decent ones (you can click on them for a bigger picture):






It's pretty cool being able to take as many pictures as you want of a subject without worry of running out of film. I haven't had this kind of creative control over photography since I had my old Nikon FM film camera, and even then I only had the one standard lens.

I ordered myself a new camera bag the other day online and it should be in tomorrow at work, so I'll take all my gear to work with me tomorrow so I can play with it when it shows up.

Fun stuff!