I hope everyone had a great christmas and holidays so far. No this is not the Death Star, it’s a full moon on Christmas Day.
This year we were lucky and had a full moon on Christmas Day. The last festive full moon was in 1977 – 38 years ago and the next one is not due until 2034 according to NASA.
For the Photographer:
To get the picture right I had to play a bit with my camera until I got it. First I thought about long exposure to get some stars with the moon. But even a 2-second exposure turned out to be fatal. The moon was too blurry. When you look at the moon, he doesn’t really seem to move. Try a 2-second exposure and you get a terrible blurred image. I used my 70-200mm with a 2x converter, this brings me to a zoom of 400 mm for this picture.
So I ramped up my ISO to 640, set my aperture to 13 and let the camera do the exposure calculation. Make sure you set your camera to “center-weight” exposure. If not, the camera tries to expose the black around the moon as well to get an even grey image. My camera calculated the exposure to be 1/250. Being set up on a tripod this was no problem and to further prevent shaking I used also mirror lockup and a 2-second timer.
I took a bunch of pictures just to make sure I have one good one. It’s hard to judge the quality on the little screen. After that some post processing in Lightroom and after quiet a bit of cropping here we are.
Peter has a passion for Traveling, Photography, and Geocaching. These are the best ingredients for amazing adventures all over the globe. “Traveling is fun, no matter if you stay in a luxury hotel or travel like a backpacker.” Peter shares his experiences on his Blog www.gatetoadventures.com
Some of Peter’s photos are published on corporate websites, in-flight magazines, travel guides, and much more.