Tag Archives: Moon

Foot Loose

Posted by dkrashb on

If yesterday felt like spring, today felt like summer.  I start off the morning taking Tisen for a long walk.  Tisen and I have been walking a mile less daily than I thought we were.  Since we are both getting thick through the middle, I up our mileage to avoid cutting back on food.

I start off in a T-shirt, light-weight fleece, and rain jacket.  By the time we make it to Walnut St, I tie the jacket around my waist.  As we work our way across the river and back to Market St, I tie the fleece and jacket together.

When I get home, I lure Tisen into the bedroom with my sleeping husband and rush off to the gym.  When I get back, my husband tells me Tisen laid on the floor by the door whining the entire time I was gone.  He apparently never realized my husband was in the room.

Tisen has been getting more and more aggressive with strangers.  When we walk at noon, I practice having him sit when another dog approaches or when people are going by.  I am trying to assert myself gently, but when I correct him with the ever-so-effective “neh-eh-eh” noise, he cowers enough to make me feel bad.  Surely he knows by now I will never, ever hit him?

In the evening, the three of us walk to the grocery store and my husband stands outside with Tisen while I run in.  Tisen stands on the sidewalk so intently watching the door that he doesn’t notice when another dog passes him within a couple of feet.

As we walk home from the grocery store, we notice the moon.  A tiny sliver of a new moon, just a narrow slice of light.  It’s setting already.

I rush up to the roof to see if I can get a decent shot before it sets.  The last thing I see as I rush out the door is Tisen running after me with his Puppy Love heart in his mouth.

It’s so windy that the lens (at 400mm plus a 1.4x extender) bounces around making it hard to focus.  I tighten everything that turns.  The lens still bounces.  I set up for a shot and then step over the tripod to block the wind.  Except, instead of stepping over, I trip over it.  I start over setting up the shot.  Things get only worse.

I do what any woman whose husband is cooking a quick dinner downstairs would do, I pack it in for the night.

When I pick up my tripod, the camera swings around and smacks me in the head.  It should not do that.  Inside, after being attacked by a frantic Tisen, I discover the foot plate on my lens foot has come completely loose.  No wonder my lens wouldn’t settle!

In the meantime, after a happy dance, Tisen settles down and is so darn cute, I stop worrying about his anxiety issues.

Catch the Moon

Posted by dkrashb on

I have been using the moon as a model a lot, but I find it is not as cooperative as I expected.  While, like a model, it’s a heavenly body, unlike a model, it presents itself on a predictable schedule.  As such, you would think it would be easy to schedule a shoot.  However, I have learned that a) there is such a thing as cloud cover, b) the moon doesn’t always rise before I go to bed, c) the moon often rises out of sight from where I am looking.

As a result, I have started to worry more about missing the shots of the moon rising behind the Walnut Street bridge in August.  I now wonder if perhaps that was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I missed.

Now that I have a lunar calendar that tells me what time the moon rises, a good tripod, and the ideal composition in mind, I just need the moon to return to it’s former position in the sky.  In doing a little research, I found www.photoephemeris.com for planning outdoor shoots in advance and even tools to figure out where the moon will rise and the path it will travel.  (Maybe we can all be Ansel Adams after all?)

However, this doesn’t answer my question as to how long it will be before the moon rises in the same location.  I am having some troubles finding an answer to this.  I have found articles on the difference in appearance of the moon at apogee vs perigee, the repeating cycle of maxima and minima delineation that takes 18 1/2 years, and calculating the differences in brightness, but I still can’t find how long it takes for the moon to rise in the same location.  I’m guessing that it will repeat within my lifetime, but probably not soon.  In the meantime, I keep watching the moon when it chooses to show itself and looking for opportunities to shoot it rising.

The shot here is a full moon rising through clouds, shot with my iPhone (which was convinced it needed to flash) from a rest area while driving back to Chattanooga from Columbus.  While this looks more like something I might, say, paint during a continuing education class on impressionist painting, I am still impressed by the improvements in the iPhone camera from the 3GS to the 4S–just don’t expect to get good landscape photos at night.

I am particularly impressed with the LCD flash on the iPhone 4S.  I was a little surprised by how brightly it flashed when I took a picture, but when I discovered the flashlight app now has a setting that lets you turn on the LCD light continuously to use it as a flashlight, I was amazed.  I was able to find my workout clothes in the dark this morning and successfully determined the difference between black and dark purple.  If you haven’t upgraded, it’s time.

Full Moon Risin’

Posted by dkrashb on

This is my 100th blog post.  It’s not relevant to the rest of this entry, but feels like a milestone worth mentioning in any case.  100 days of 100 posts.  About 120,000 words.  That’s about 480 pages of blogging.  I wonder how many pages of interesting reading I would end up with if I went back and carefully edited it all?

Having shared that little milestone with you, it seems somehow appropriate to me that my 100th entry should be about the full moon.

I’ve had a busy week–or should I say busier than usual?  But I’ve marked the full moon on my calendar.  It’s a moment I’ve been waiting for.  In August, I went out to the Market St bridge and shot the full moon rising behind the Walnut St bridge but I didn’t have a tripod that could hold my telephoto yet.  I thought I might get at least one or two good shots with my monopod, but the lens was too heavy and the wind was too strong and all my pictures were blurred, although I still found them interesting.

Since then, I’ve acquired a new tripod that’s up to the job.  However, we’ve been traveling a lot and I’ve missed the full moon until now.  In August, I didn’t think it was that big a deal I missed the opportunity to shoot the moon rising behind the bridge.  I forgot everything I learned in Astronomy 101, I guess, and didn’t think about the fact that the moon wouldn’t be rising there for long.  The moon now rises from behind the hills behind our building.  There is no opportunity to catch people walking in front of the moon.

But, I want to shoot the full moon anyway.  I am fascinated by the moon.  Having been shooting the moon for many nights the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with what I’ve learned from some of my photographer friends.  I’ve watched the moon moving across the LCD on my camera as I try to set up for a shot and realized how quickly you really have to move to keep up with it.

I’ve also learned to cut way back on the exposure if you want to see the craters in the moon.  And, that the fuller the moon is, the less interesting it actually looks in photos because the light flattens out all the details.  In spite of this new knowledge, I love capturing the full moon behind objects on the horizon.  Tonight, I take my camera and tripod up to the roof to see what the options are.

I go to the roof and discover gusting winds.  I position my camera on the tripod and experiment with holding the strap so it won’t catch the wind and introduce movement.  I am ready to go, but where is the moon?  It’s well past the official moonrise, but I’ve learned that the moon appears at the horizon later here, probably because of the hills.

I am poised and ready to pounce–the moments the moon will be at the horizon are so short and I have to focus manually before I start shooting.  I look along the horizon for signs of light in the approximate area I expect the moon.  For a moment, I am like a 50’s housewife with dinner on the table, scanning the street for her husband returning home late from work.

Then, I see light.  Through the red leaves of a tree being whipped about by the wind, a tiny bit of glow appears just above the horizon.  I have to wait for enough of it to rise that I can use it to focus and then start shooting.  I adjust the exposure again and again, torn between being able to see the color in the trees and not over-exposing the moon.  I keep shooting as the moon is released from the branches of the tree, making me think, oddly, of an egg bursting from an ovary.

As the moon rises into the sky, I keep shooting, but the photos of just the moon really aren’t interesting to me.  They show a round disk, yellowish in the light from the setting sun, with splotches of brown on it.  Prime time is over and it’s time to shoot something else or go in.  Since the wind is getting only more fierce, I choose to go in.

I slide the legs of the tripod in enough that I can carry the whole thing over my shoulder without running into too many things.  Then, I head back down the stairs and into the apartment.  I pop out the CF card and pop it into the computer to see what I’ve got on the big screen.

My shutter speeds were slow enough that the tree in front of the moon appears in motion.  I decide I like that.  I decide my favorite shot is one that shows the color of the leaves in the tree with the moon flaring through it.  The leaves are in motion, the moon is frozen but overexposed.  I decide that I like that too.

I sit at my computer and stare at my shot for a while.  I consider whether it would have been better at a faster shutter speed so the tree was sharp instead of in motion.  Or if I should try to turn down the exposure on the moon in my editing software.  Or if I should crop it so the moon is less centered in the frame.  I consider copying the photo and trying all of these things.  Then, I decide once more that I just like it and to let go of how anyone else will judge it.  After all, the shot is for me.