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The photo-blog of an entirely unknown photographer.
u n d e r e x p o s e d
The total lunar eclipse last night was yet another good photographic learning experience for me from several angles. First, it reminded me precisely why I tend to not do a lot of shooting in January, and second, it was a new experience shooting at night and shooting an subject with some serious dynamic range: the lunar eclipse.
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First, holy cold batman. Apparently it was 10F with a 0F windchill. It sure felt colder than that! Working with the camera in big thick gloves is clumsy, every time I exhale while up against the viewfinder it fogs up, and finally, battery life is cut a bit shorter when the batteries are that cold. It was probably worth it, and I'm also probably luck that my battery gave out when it did.
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Combined with the fact that I don't have a cable release, the cold made it difficult to get still shots. The fact that I was in manual mode (bye bye auto bracketing) made it really hard to do multiple shots of the same frame at different exposures for compositing in photoshop. Still, I got a few shots to turn out very well, a lot that turned out alright, and after enough experimentation, I came up with a method that worked. Still, next time I go shooting stars or the moon, I think I'll schedule it for July.
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Finally, I'll mention here that I've finally upgraded my nearly 3 year old computer now. The new machine which replaces the old 'mach' is named 'stillframe' and was speced to make lightroom, photoshop, and the whole digital photography back end run more smoothly. Well, that it does. The Intel Core 2 Quad marks the first time I've departed from AMD processors in my main machine since the original Athlon beat the pants off the Pentium II at floating point. Intel has finally reclaimed their throne.
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It also marks the first time I've ever maxed out a system on RAM when I bought it. In this case, that means 8 gigs, but that also means that I had to upgrade to Windows XP x64 (or Vista, and I have a few friends to thank for talking me OUT of going to Vista). I only bought 1 new hard drive with the computer, and it's fast rather than large. In the next few months I'm going to be replacing all my 200 gig and 250 gig hard drives with 1 TB drives.
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