The Moon - is glowing red!

We had a great opportunity this morning on the west coast of the US to see a Lunar Eclipse. After my wife woke me up, at 3am, I went out to the park across fom my house and took a couple of photos.

This was much more challenging than I had thought.

With the darkness, I had to manually focus the camera (oh heavens...).

The lens I was using was my canon 28-200mm zoom. I did a quick check with a digital zoom after taking a test shot, and found it was still out of focus. When I manually focussed at the farthest distance, I had to back it off a little to get it into focus. That took a little time since I had to basically take a shot and digitial zoom in to see if I was in focus or not.

Long time lapse shots (30 seconds) clearly show the rotation of the earth. I had to drop my exposure to the 3.2 second range, and even then you could see it when zooming in on the stars nearby.

I was really impressed with how NoiseNinja helped with this as well...

Winery shots

Our local photography group the photonuts, had an outing at a local winery. I showed up late and was relegated to walking around outside, but still managed to get a couple of interesting shots.

I was very frustrated by that darn bird however, he only flew when there was something between him and me.