Lunar eclipses aren’t really that special, there was on in June of this year, and another coming up in June of 2011. What made this one special was that it was the first total lunar eclipse to occur on the day of the Northern Winter Solstice since 1638, and the next time that will happen again will be in May of 2096 – defiantly a photo worthy event.
I’m a little crazy when it comes to photographing at night in the cold. When I get in that mindset of “iso is good, nice composition, self timer on, …” I tend to forget exactly how cold it is. So while it was a tad chilly, it didn’t bother me too much. I’m just happy the clouds we had all day cleared up and gave us a crystal clear sky the entire eclipse.
The only post processing I did to this image was cropping, just a tad noise reduction and sharpening – no color boosting what so ever. I wanted to show exactly how the colors looked that night, without any misleading photo editing.
I haven’t tweaked the saturation or sharpness too much on the camera, since it is new and all, I haven’t gotten around to all the settings yet. Even without any boosting, the colors look absolutely amazing. It was quite tricky finding a good exposure. Cameras naturally want to expose as bright as possible, and when trying to photograph the moon, the camera will always over expose – forcing you to shoot on manual while under exposing. Taking a few test shots, trying to find the right setting, I landed on 400 iso, 2.5 sec shutter, and 6.3 aperture, on a tripod of course. Not wanting to look for my shutter release, I put the camera on a 2 second timer and moved away. Not using a timer for night photography, usually gets me blurry exposures, so almost always I use a self timer or a shutter release.
