irishblogs – Page 234 – In Photos dot Org

How to photograph a lunar eclipse

Tonight the moon will be eclipsed by the Earth which will turn it red for a few hours from about 10:44pm. I’ll be outside with my 20D and a Canon 75-300mm zoom hoping to grab a few shots, but first it’s important to know a few things:

The moon shines by reflecting light from the Sun and the Earth, it’s bright.
The night sky is dark which will fool camera sensors.
All celestial bodies are in motion. You won’t see it from moment to moment with your eyes of course but even a 1 second exposure of the night sky will produce an image that captures that movement.

What can you do? When photographing the moon normally, you expose as if you were shooting at midday on a bright sunlit day. The eclipsed moon isn’t as bright though. If you can, shoot in manual mode. Open your aperture as wide as possible on your lens (smaller f numbers), and take a few shots with different speeds. That’s called bracketing and is really easy and inexpensive with digital. Use the LCD screen on your camera and most importantly the histogram function – that will tell you if your image is exposed properly.

With my lens zoomed in it opens to f5.6, and I found that an exposure of 1/125sec gives a slightly underexposed shot of the moon. Start around there and work your way up and down the exposure times. If you’re using a digital camera it’s costing you nothing.

As you’ll be using a zoom lens, make sure that you have a tripod handy. It also helps to have a cable release too, but if not, use your camera’s timer function to reduce shake.

Here’s an excellent guide to shooting the moon. That guide recommends the “sunny 16” rule. Shoot at f/16 and bracket from there, but the eclipsed moon is much dimmer than a full moon. If you search around there’s a wealth of information online about photographing the moon. Good luck!

The picture above was shot on November 19th, 2005, colour corrected and sharpened but not resized. That’s about as big as a 300mm lens on a Canon 20D will do without extra magnification. It’s getting foggy outside. I hope it clears in the next hour!

City flowers in the sun

City flowers in the sun

Flowers in the Peace Park in Cork flourish in the early April sunlight last year. Does anyone recognise this one?

Good luck to everyone competing at the Blog Awards tonight and have a great night regardless!

What the hell! Flickr gave me a dud URL again. That’s three in a row. Time to complain.

Kristy asked for a desktop sized version so here’s a 1024×768 version that is the proper dimensions for a standard desktop. Most of my photos have a 1.5 ratio between sides so I had to crop this to 1.33. Please if you use it, leave in my name and URL at bottom of the image. Thanks!

Aperture	ƒ/3.5
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	1/800s

Explore Cork City in Photos

Flickr has a wonderful mapping system that makes it super easy to view photos from a particular location. Unfortunately Flickr can’t automatically figure out where the photo was taken. That has to be done by the user but it’s as simple as opening the map in your browser and dragging it to the proper location. In the future your camera will do this for you like the brand new Canon 1D MKIII already does.

I do offer one warning. There are 17 pages of photos around Cork City center alone. It’s going to take you a while to get through them all but it’s an enjoyable romp around the city. You might even come across a few new sights! Go explore the city!

If discovering Cork isn’t enough, you can also visit Dublin, Galway, Limerick, Waterford, or even Blarney. Out of interest, I tried Mallow too but the link given for that doesn’t seem to work unfortunately.

I previously mentioned this mapping system here but it’s worth another look if you missed that post.

Innovative Streets

Innovative Streets

It’s good to look down sometimes. I think this was used to hold a decorative safety pole but I don’t remember ever seeing it used. There are poles on the other side of this narrow street however.

The street of course is Paul Street behind Waterstones.

I was going to blog that yesterday was World Book Day but time ran out for me and the power cut didn’t help my motivation much. Nevertheless, Cearta.ie blogged it. Check out some of my photos from last year’s World Book Day celebration!

Aperture	ƒ/11
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/400s

The Lady Smiles

The Lady Smiles

On her lunch break she smiles instead of smoking, at least for a moment.

This is the second and final image of the Lady on her break series. If you look very carefully at the window you’ll see my face, my hand, and the back of Jacinta’s head as we walked past. Thanks for the comments yesterday!

Aperture	ƒ/5.6
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/80s

The Lady smokes

On her break, she lights up a cigarette to relax. Who did she see?

The Magnum Blog has been running for a few weeks. I blogged the original opening of the site ages ago, but it wasn’t ready for prime time and it made it’s debut a short while ago. A few days ago, A faked portrait of my generation explored some of the issues surrounding street photography. A legal case in Quebec in effect made street photography illegal in Canada.
Here in Ireland, photographers do have the right to photograph people, but if the subjects have an expectation of privacy then you’re not allowed photograph them. That could include a couple talking on the street. That’s only the opinion of our Minister For Justice but unfortunately many of my street photos could be on shaky ground if that really was what the law said.

Oh, another photo of this girl tomorrow!

Aperture	ƒ/5.6
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/80s

The Black Surfer

The Black Surfer

A surfer rides the waves at Garretstown in early January this year. I’m not sure how many were out there but we talked to one wet and cold looking one when he came out of the water and he told us they had been there for a few hours.

The heavens opened and rain fell shortly after. Only the surfers were left out in the open.

Donal has a good post about exposure. Donal, you should read Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera by Bryan Peterson. I’ll lend you my copy if you want. It’s a great read.

Aperture	ƒ/6.3
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	200mm
ISO	800
Shutter speed	1/125s

Ireland V England at Croke Park

Ireland V England at Croke Park

Ireland played England in rugby at Croke Park yesterday, and Ireland won, 43 points to 13!

This was an historic occasion. Landsowne Road, where rugby and soccer matches are normally played is being renovated. Croke Park is the headquarters of the GAA, the native Irish sports of football and hurling. Playing “foreign sports” there was like someone desecrating holy ground. Not that that stopped American football being played there a few years ago. I guess some sports are more foreign than others. It literally took years for this to happen. I kid you not. Year after year, the issue of “foreign sports” came up at GAA meetings and it was only recently they allowed them in. Bravo!

Anyway, to pile insult upon injury, the ~~first~~ second rugby game there would be Ireland vs England. Republican supporters were up in arms during the week. “800 years!” “Bloody Sunday!” “1916!” “Black and Tans!” Imagine, “God Save The Queen” would be played in Croke Park? It’s hard to fathom but it’s all over now.

This is the closest I got to the match. We were in town, I wandered around a bit with my camera before heading home and watched a DVD, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. What a wacky film. I loved it! Yes, I don’t have much of an interest in sport.

Aperture	ƒ/4.5
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	400
Shutter speed	1/250s

The shadows have it all

The shadows have it all

Sometimes it’s the shadows that are the focus of my camera rather than the people in it.

Aperture	ƒ/11
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/320s

blueMarine – Free digital photography workflow software

blueMarine

blueMarine is being developed as an open source digital photography workflow environment. It’s written in Java so it’ll run just about anywhere – Windows, Mac and Linux should be “easy” to support.

I haven’t tried it yet and I’m not a fan of Java apps in general but has anyone else tried it? They say they’re close to a beta release so it might be worth a look soon.

Start thinking of an opensource application like Aperture or Lightroom that enables you to organize, develop, print and publish your photos. Pretty standard stuff nowadays.
Let’s go on and let’s think of the workflow. For the existing commercial applications the workflow starts just after shooting the photo and ends with a print on paper, the photo archived and maybe a web gallery published.

Judging by the screenshots, it’s come a long way, even supporting geotagging of images and “Gannet”, a plugin for the amateur ornithologist photographer. (found on the GIMP Users list)

Escalator Moments

Escalator Moments

A one second exposure captures the movement through time of the escalator in Nikeworld San Francisco last August. This is one of a series of shots, including a few of Mark and Andy although I think this is the most dramatic of them.

I wasn’t going to post this at all except that a few days ago another escalator photo made the front page of Digg somehow. Digg away please 🙂

Aperture	ƒ/16
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1.3s

Girl reflecting on bus

Girl reflecting on bus

Waiting at the traffic lights, the camera can still see you, even if it’s not pointed in your direction. Those are the buildings of the Grand Parade in Cork behind her.

Aperture	ƒ/3.5
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	18mm
ISO	200
Shutter speed	1/100s