Taking Pictures of the Moon

Alternate title:Â If moon was cookie!

What do you do at 2 AM on a nice night? Probably sleep, if you have any common sense. Sadly, I lack that essential quality, so I go outside and take pictures of the moon. I have posted moon pictures before, and a few people have asked me how I get shots of the moon.  I am no pro photographer by any means and these pics are not that great, but they should help illustrate a few points. Here are the two things you will need:

1. A tripod. You are going to be using long exposures. Unless you are a world class surgeon, your hands are not that steady.
2. A camera. One with a decent amount of zoom is preferred. I was using a 70-300mm lens on my DSLR, but there are P&S super zoom cameras that will work just fine. If you do not have a lot of zoom, you just have to be a little more creative in your shot composition.

Go outside on a moonlit night and start snapping away. The couple of shots I have in this post were on a cloudless night, so I used trees in my yard and focused on them instead of the moon. On cloudy nights, you can achieve some very cool effects when the clouds obscure part of the moon. A remote is also great to have, since you want to introduce as little vibration as possible to the camera that you have zoomed in to its limit. If you do not have a remote, see if your camera has a delayed activation where the picture is not captured until a second or two after you press the shutter release. Many cameras these days let you adjust the exposure time which will allow you to play around with different exposures to see which work best for your conditions.

You do not need a super senstive camera. The moon is plenty bright on its own, especially if you are zoomed in that far. I was shooting at ISO 100, and most cameras these days can go way higher than that. Go outside and see what you can get and be sure to let me know in the comments if you get some really good ones!

Stunning self portraits with the Stick Pic

I was snooping around Gear Talk today and saw a write up about the Stick Pic, an intriguing solution to a common hiker problem. How often do you get to a summit and want to take a portrait with you and some pretty girl (or guy, whatever floats your boat) framed by a gorgeous backdrop? You set your camera on a rock, set the self timer, only to have it fall into the abyss off a cliff. Maybe you just reach out as far as you can, taking a poorly framed picture that contains not much more than your sweaty faces. You could hand the camera to a stranger, assuming there is even one there, and then watch him him bound down the mountainside like a billy goat with your precious digicam clutched in his sweaty mitts.

The Stick Pic is a little camera mount that attaches to a trekking pole so you can extend the trekking pole, have it a few feet out, and take a nice picture of you with plenty of mountain in view. It weighs 10 grams and comes in different sizes that fit what look like the majority of poles on the market. They have a list on their orders page showing which size fits which pole, so be sure to grab the correct size. According to them, they also make custom sized ones at no extra charge, which is pretty badass customer service.

I don’t think I could quite pull this off with my 400 lb DSLR, but that is why I am one of those dummies that carries a tripod on hikes. Don’t be like me, buy a Stick Pic and save your back.

More Callaway Pictures

Here are some more shots from Callaway Gardens. You can find larger versions of all of them in the forums.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trip Report: Callaway Gardens

My wife and I headed to Callaway Gardens yesterday to see what was going on in the world of butterflies and flowers. I haven’t been there in at least 10 years, and that was only for the Christmas lights show, and she hasn’t ever really looked around the grounds of the gardens, so we both were not prepared for some of the wonderfulness that we came across.

The day started with the Butterfly House (or whatever they call it), which is one of the gardens’ main attractions, and for good reason. You walk in to the lobby, with butterfly artwork and fat rednecks everywhere, then stroll through some double doors into the hatching area. From what I can tell, they let the caterpillars form cocoons in a lab type area, then pin them up in rows in a display behind glass so visitors can watch the process. Judging from the amount of butterflies in the conservatory combined with the short life span of a butterfly, taking care of the cocoons is a constant process.

Read the rest of this entry »

Review – Triopo Tripod

My old tripod was the cheapest full size tripod I could find one day when I walked into Wolf Camera (Ritz). It was fairly light, but mostly because it was made out of crappy materials and could not handle much weight on the top. It also could not lay flat and let the camera point straight down, which was a bummer for doing product photography for ebay and my website. Before my Costa Rica trip, I decided to upgrade and the end result was a Triopo C258KJ2 Tripod.

Read the rest of this entry »

Five Bajillion Costa Rica Pics

I only took ~1000 pics in Costa Rica. Shame on me! Here are the better or more interesting ones. Keep in mind that they are not edited at all, so some of them are kind of rough. The only one I messed with was the little girl on the beach, and that was only to crop it a bit.

I’m working on the trip reports tonight, so hopefully I’ll have them all up this week.

Discuss in forums

Eclipse + Camera = Fun!

I spent about two hours outside playing with my dog and taking pics of the full lunar eclipse that happened tonight. Came inside, unloaded the pics to my PC and realized that I had been shooting in the shittiest jpg mode with no RAW. Oops.

There are a couple of halfway decent shots in there. I was outside shooting extended exposure shots in the dark, so of course I busted out some flashlights and took pics of the beams lighting up the neighborhood.

Meh, maybe I’ll do better in 2010.

Read the rest of this entry »

Review – LowePro Slingshot 200

Thanks to Cat’s deal hunting, I am now the proud owner of a fancy new camera bag, the LowePro Slingshot 200. This is definitely a step up from my previous at home storage solution (the floor) and could also be considered better than my trip storage solution (a ziplock bag).

My first impression was that this thing has a ton of room. Here is my Pentax K10D with kit lens attached and zoom lens in the main compartment:

Read the rest of this entry »