One of my favorite subjects

The Moon..

When we were enroute to Joshua tree last friday, learned that it was a special night. The "blue moon" as it is called is a rarity.

Once in a while there are two full moon days in the month of August and this second full moon in the same month is also refered to as blue moon (However the real blue moon reference was created by the moon becoming blue under a volcanic ash cloud somewhere in Europe in the middle ages.. that I remember from the good old quizzing days in school)

Digressed as usual.. coming to this special moon.. 

Stopped on the side of a freeway exit on Route 5 someplace near Panoche Road and took a bunch of shots with the 70-200mm using the 2x extender. Tried the HDR stuff but it doesn't work. Maybe there are some manual tricks that need to be done to get rid of the blue and red ring that comes up in PHotoshop when using the merge to HDR option.

See for yourself. The default shot is not bad as my family was oohing and aahing over this photograph.

However when you do the HDR merge on three shots you get this..

Granted the detail in the highlights and shadows pop out but the edge is now off. There is a ring around the edge that has blue on one side and red on the other. Have a dozen shots of the moon in sets of three and it happens on all of the triplets no matter what the default setting was with respect to shutter speed or aperture.

f8, f11, f13, f22 all end up with same ring! Does the moon move that much within two seconds to cause this? Technically this was on a stable tripod shot and even if there are miniscule shakes thanks to the trucks on the freeway, the software is supposed to align the moon based on features in the photograph anyways, right? There is not much to align in three photographs which have a moon in the middle of a black background. So what gives?

Have to pore over a few internet pages from expert moon photographers to figure this one out. Not going to get a blue moon anytime soon. But if you know of ways to fix this in HDR, do let me know.

Eclipse

Not the best shots, but did start capturing the solar eclipse and had to give up in the middle.

Why?

The kids insisted on "bike riding as a family". So all four of us decided to ride a bike during the solar eclipse. It was interesting because we saw so many people in our street with video cameras on tripods and special glasses staring at the sun.

They probably all thought we were a weird family to go biking and ignoring a once in a lifetime event. Little did they know about my frustration.

People scared me about two things

1. Do Not look into the sun directly
2. Do not take pictures with the camera by trying to zoom into sun as it will damage your image sensor..

First I tried to cover the lens with some dark polythene. That created a large flare. Then decided to use my extender (which is a 2x) on my 70-200 mm f2.8 L (this is a 2000 dollar piece of glass) and initially San was giving me the look and saying "I hope you know what you are doing because you are not going to get any camera replacement money from this family!"

The thing becomes pretty bulky at this point, so a tripod is a must. (Incidentally, shot the hummingbirds kissing using this setup.. you can stay far enough from animals, birds and snakes and get shots with a 400mm setup as long as it is bright outside).

Now the extender puts the 200 f2.8 at 400 f5.6! Gets the sun pretty close. So I used a remote trigger and instead of staring at the sun directly, stared at it indirectly and took shots at 1/8000 seconds and f22 with an ISO set to 100. Pretty much pushed the exposure to bare minimum to get these shots. Also used a gap between branches in a tree to get the shots so that the Image sensor did not overload. Then cropped the images.

Next time there is a solar eclipse, going to leave home, hit the mountains and get some welders glass or the right polarizing and ND filter combinations and take photographs! (My CEO took some really neat shots using this method. He had to adjust the white balance. I didn't have to, but the effect is much better on his shots!)

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Hummingbirds

Have seen some really good photographs of Hummingbirds taken by my classmates in the last few days.

That reminded me of my chance encounter with a pair of Hummingbirds at one of those picnic tables on top of a vista point at Palm Springs last year.

Now that yours truly has Photoshop, found that picture and edited it to my hearts content..

Here is my contribution to the Hummingbird collection.

It is a pity that we cut down the honeysuckle plant in our backyard as part of the construction. Need to go buy one and plant it just to get the birds to visit our house again...

or at least put a feeder in the backyard!

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