We had a full Lunar Eclipse yesterday. Normally whenever we have these sorts of events I don't get to see it because of cloud cover, so this time I went for a drive further north in to dryer regions. South Australia's mid north is quite arid. It's the first week of Spring, Winter has just finished, and this is what much of it looks like:
And this is the town of Wilmington, near where I decided to park up for the night and wait for the show:
The photos of the eclipse that I got aren't the greatest, but there's some good information in here that might be useful to other aspiring photographers.
My camera is a Canon EOS 200D Mark II - the old Rebel series, and the lens I'm using is a Canon 75 to 300 mm zoom lens, max aperture 5.6. I've retained the exif information in these images for those that are really interested.
For a good picture of a normal full moon I use:
ISO 800
AF 10
Exp 1/1250 sec.
But as the moon slowly got swallowed up it got darker and those settings had to change quite dramatically. Each of these pictures was taken roughly 15 minutes apart, a Lunar Eclipse takes a long time, roughly 4 hours from start to finish.
That's it, that's as far as I could go with a hand held camera. Here's an important lesson for aspiring photographers - buy yourself a decent tripod. The cheap piece of junk that I had on hand was worse than my shaky old man's hands and was completely unusable, instead I held my camera against a post and tried to steady it that way.
That worked well enough while I was still able to use fast shutter speeds but when the moon was fully dark I really needed to start doing longer exposures and I couldn't hold the camera still enough for that.
A rough rule of thumb for taking hand held shots is that to avoid blurry pictures your shutter speed needs to be twice your focal length, so for a 300 mm lens I need to keep a shutter speed of faster than 1/600 second.
And this is the town of Wilmington, near where I decided to park up for the night and wait for the show:
The photos of the eclipse that I got aren't the greatest, but there's some good information in here that might be useful to other aspiring photographers.
My camera is a Canon EOS 200D Mark II - the old Rebel series, and the lens I'm using is a Canon 75 to 300 mm zoom lens, max aperture 5.6. I've retained the exif information in these images for those that are really interested.
For a good picture of a normal full moon I use:
ISO 800
AF 10
Exp 1/1250 sec.
But as the moon slowly got swallowed up it got darker and those settings had to change quite dramatically. Each of these pictures was taken roughly 15 minutes apart, a Lunar Eclipse takes a long time, roughly 4 hours from start to finish.
That's it, that's as far as I could go with a hand held camera. Here's an important lesson for aspiring photographers - buy yourself a decent tripod. The cheap piece of junk that I had on hand was worse than my shaky old man's hands and was completely unusable, instead I held my camera against a post and tried to steady it that way.
That worked well enough while I was still able to use fast shutter speeds but when the moon was fully dark I really needed to start doing longer exposures and I couldn't hold the camera still enough for that.
A rough rule of thumb for taking hand held shots is that to avoid blurry pictures your shutter speed needs to be twice your focal length, so for a 300 mm lens I need to keep a shutter speed of faster than 1/600 second.
