Dave’s Photo Blog

Sunday night proved to be almost perfect, with clear blue skies and only a moderate breeze. That’s important, because a strong wind can blow the camera around. When that happens, the ISS/Shuttle that should register as a line in a long exposure can sometimes look all wiggly. Not in this case. In order to minimize any vibrations, I also locked the mirror up using the custom functions of the camera. When the mirror flips up, it can introduce a tiny amount of vibration. It might not register if you were shooting a long exposure of a still life, for example. But when you are shooting a needle thing light trail from space craft, it will show up as a series of bends, or sawtooths, in the line.

It’s not that it was all in my eyes and stuff. It wasn’t. But here’s the deal: I had a polarizer on and that means that I didn’t have the lens shade on, as it won’t fit around my polarizer holder. While I was looking through the viewfinder composing the shot, I couldn’t really see any impacts from shooting fairly directly at the sun. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

First, the uncomfortable part. I had no idea this photograph was so full of tension until I got in into Lightroom. I just didn’t see it when I was taking the photo. I saw it when I cropped it to straighten the fence. It was then I realized how terribly wrong this picture is.

As I’ve obsessed about before, taking photos of the moon is hard enough under normal circumstances. Let me tell you a bit about what I was up against for these pictures as we reach totality.