Robert's Ramblings

Tonight was a blustery night with patchy cloud. My original plan was to take some comparative images of the full moon between a cheap 500mm fixed F8 mirror lens and a good quality 200mm lens with cropping. Well that was the plan but the wind played havoc and the only way I could get a stable setup was using the tiny 500mm lens and a tripod virtually at ground level. I decided to stay with the mirror lens and try and capture the moody sky above.

Begin the technical problems...

The latitude of the image made it impossible to recover detail in the full unblocked moon and also cloud and HDR techniques were not possible as the high winds caused the clouds to move very quickly across the sky making multiple exposures impossible.

By waiting for cloud to partially obscure the moon I was able to find images which had narrow enough latitude to capture both the moon and cloud's detail but this created a new problem of not enough light to freeze the moment of the racing clouds using an F8 lens.

The compromise was to use a combination of high ISO (3200) and 1/30s shutter at the fixed F8 of the Lens. Perhaps I should have tried the faster 200mm and cropped but despite a noisy image I quite like the final shot.

... Robert

Photo: Robert Rath, 'Moody Full Moon'. 1/30 sec at 500mm(Mirror) f8.0, ISO 3200