The Sky, March 3rd
There’s something zen about watching an eclipse for an hour and 15 minutes. It was definitely worth it though. Magical stuff.
This photo is better bigger and much better much bigger.
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About this site
In June 2000 I started blogging at peteashton.com and 10 years later in June 2010 I decided to stop. Blogging here, that is. I started a clean slate over on I Am Pete Ashton and maintain all manner of other web presences which are all listed here along with my contact details.
You probably came here via a Google search or from following a link on some old blog post somewhere. I hope what you find is useful in some way, though do check the publication date - it might be rather old now.
Thanks for your eyeballs.
Pete Ashton
Brilliant! Would be interested in some technical info about taking the photos and compiling them. Cheers!
Okay. The main reason for doing the montage was that I don’t have a very powerful zoom lens. The was taken with a 120mm which is effectively a 180mm on the Nikon D70s. In order to get a decent single shot of the moon you’d need something like a 300 or 600mm lens. (I’m guessing). If you look at the original that’s the full resolution I was getting for each shot.
So I set up the camera on the tripod and pretty much hit the shutter every few minutes, checking every so often that the moon hadn’t moved out of frame. You don’t notice it but the moon really moves quite fast. This is one reason why you need to use a fast shutter speed.
The other reason is the moon is very bright. These were shot at 200th/sec at f5.6 which is pretty much a daylight setting. Anything slower/wider than that and you don’t get the detail on the moon.
Other tips. Manual focus and manual exposure are your friends. Focus to infinity since the moon is a long way away. manual exposure because you’re going to want a consistent brightness throughout. You’ll notice this montage is in black and white. That’s because I stupidly left the white balance on Auto and fixing it on the computer was too much trouble. But there’s something classic about moon photos in b/w so I’m not too bothered. Basically, as with all montages, you’re going to want consistency throughout so, once you’ve got your settings, stick with them.
Doing the montage itself is a fairly simple process. First measure the size of each block _ I went with 250x250px. Then work out what size canvas you need. I had 55 photos so went with a 6×4 canvas which would fit 54 of them in. (I have a preference for 6×4).
Bring up a new canvas in Photoshop and set the grid to the dimensions of the blocks – in my case every 250 pixels. Then select each moon and past it into its square. Use the grid to make sure they’re aligned, add a black layer underneath, flatten the whole thing and save.
In summary, Nikon D70s digital SLR camera, 120mm zoom lens (effectively 180mm), tripod, plenty of tea, Photoshop.
Hope that’s of some use!
Oh, one other thing that just occured to me. ISO. Due to the brightness of the moon I had mine set to 200. This was a good thing. However, when shooting the red moon, which was significantly darker, it came out blurred because I was stopping down to 10th/sec or so. What I should have done was increase the ISO to 1600 in order to get a crisp moon. Doh.
(Also, next time I’m going to rig up the film camera to catch the whole thing in one 3 hour shoot (film camera don’t need bateries) which shold be interesting!)
Next lunar eclipse visible in the UK is 21 February next, so you’ve just shy of a year to buff up your nightshooting skillz.
A really good montage, nicely done.
Wow – loads of info! Cheers Pete, much appreciated. I might have to look into getting Photoshop, it seems that it’d be better for doing stuff with photos than Paintshop, which I use at the moment. I guess the clue’s in the name…
No probs Karen. Actually, if you’re just wanting to “develop” photos as opposed to chop them up and make radically different images from them you might want to have a look at Lightroom. It kinda revolutionised my photos over the last few months. There’s a 30 days trial and it’s cheaper than Photoshop too. And no, I’m not on commission.
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
Karen, I second that recommendation. I have been using the Beta version and upgraded to Version 1 of Lightroom about two weeks ago when it first came out. I own Photoshop 7, an older version that does just about everything the latest version does, but I have only used it about twice since buying Lightroom. Photoshop would be necessary for building a montage like Pete’s but maybe you can do that in Printshop anyway?