Blood Moon
Last night we experienced a full lunar eclipse that produced a 'Blood Moon'. Basically as the moon was eclipsed by the earth's shadow it slowly turns red and then stays that way for a couple hours.
After some investigation about what was involved, my boyfriend and I packed up the car and headed out to see what I could capture from the event. After driving about 45 minutes out of town we reached a good spot and started to setup. Unfortunately I realized quickly that I had completely forgotten one of the most important items that you really need for any type of night photography. My Tripod!!! We booked it back to the house, picked up my tripod and headed back out to a closer location (we are lucky enough to live on the outskirts of the Valley) and managed to setup again with only 15 minutes to spare before the eclipse was set to begin! Very happy it worked out as I had a lot of fun and got some great shots from the evening as well. Here are a couple of my favorites.
This is the moon right before the eclipse started. I had only taken my first good shots of the moon couple nights before on our test run, so this was a very good beginning for the evening! This one was taken with my trusty Canon 18-200mm f/5.6 lens.
I also have some photos of the eclipse and the beginning of the blood-moon that I will be turning into a time-lapse, but those aren't ready yet and I wanted to get these up as soon as possible! This next one is the blood moon with a bit of moonshine still showing on the right hand side. This was incredibly hard to capture right, so I am proud of this one. :)
I wanted to see what I could get with my Rokinon 14mm f2.8 wide-angle. This one shows a little more of what we were seeing, but over-exposed the moon unfortunately. I still like the end result.
This last one was taken more as an experiment. I heard that macro lenses take decent moon pictures because of the way they focus. So I pulled out my new Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens and this is what I got. The reason this is zoomed out so far is that bright star in the upper-right is actually Mars! I was very happy with the way this lens was able to focus.
All in all a very fun evening and an awesome sight. Also a lesson to always double check your gear before heading out! This was almost very bad, and we really got lucky. If you ever get the chance to see a lunar eclipse you should do it! The difference between the brightness of the full moon and the eerie darkness during the eclipse was very cool. Definitely check it out sometime.
