Actually it is a moon. The moon, our only moon. And on the evening of the 27th I grabbed both of my cameras now and went back to the field I found near my apartment a few days before. I must have planned this a bit because looking at a lunar calendar for 2018, the 27th was the night of the full moon. What I did not know to check was the cloud coverage. Now I’ve downloaded an app and know of some national weather websites that show a lot of weather type information.
But what I did learn on that day regarded a few different things. Firstly a better tripod would have been really useful. I was using the only thing I had, a very cheap plastic tripod that was not very stable. I did increase the stability a bit by hanging one of my camera bags off the hook. Giving it a heavier center of gravity. But really the second point would have been a bit more useful. A remote trigger.
I had one for the T3i, as it just takes a little 2.5mm jack. It came in some kind of photo gear bundle I would have picked up at some point. But what I would come to learn is that the 5D does not have that same convenient little port for the trigger. It required a new 3 pin plug I was not familiar with. So what resulted was a lot of blurry long exposure shots on the 5D, and some decent ones from the T3i.
There really wasn’t much I liked about these shots when I got back home and was editing them. This was absolutely a learning experience, which is always good. All it cost me was time and I took away from it some really valuable lessons.
Canon 5D w/28-135mm @80mm - 1/4 Sec - F5 - ISO 400
For example, a faster shutter make get you more detail on the moon. But you lose all the light coming through on the clouds. So it’s just dark.
This was the cloud coverage I was working with. But I actually like this, if it’s clear you don’t have much to work with. At least the clouds around the moon give you something else to constant against.
Canon 5D w/28-135mm @ 30mm - 1/5 Sec - F3.5 - ISO 3200
Now one thing that did come out from this night is one of my favorite moon shots. Just because of the colors. This next shot has most obviously been edited. But I didn’t add color into the image, just tweaked the levels. And definitely the saturation.
Canon T3i w/75-300mm @200mm - 1 Sec - F5 - ISO 100
This does seem like a good point to address something that was my thought process when I started this hobby. But after a lot of research and talking with other photographers. The “debate” about editing photos. I had a similar opinion to what I see online a lot now. Editing photos is cheating, or fake. And coming from the outside perspective I can understand why people think that. You see before and after photos used in like modeling or other mainstream images where it’s been manipulated to change the look. Usually you see it with models where they airbrush skin tone, maybe hide a bit of overweight.
I get it why that would come across as “cheating” or “fake”. As it isn’t being true to the subject material. However that seems to have spilled over into the idea that photoshop of any kind, or image editing is the same. Which is very much not true as I have come to learn. When I started I had the idea that any kind of editing was cheating, and that it would never be accepted in a “professional” world. That’s not at all how it works. Obviously I was editing my photos from the beginning, but always minor minor tweaks. Or the other end of the scale and doing things like the above just for fun.
After talking about it and doing my own research, editing is a crucial part of the process. No camera I have ever touched is perfect and can capture EXACTLY how the human eye sees. Also editing has been around for a lot longer than photoshop. It was done with film in a dark room. Dodging, burning, adjusting levels. Etc. All of these tools in photoshop came from techniques used in a dark room during development. Some of this I ever saw examples of in a fantastic documentary about Ansel Adams. Showing him working in the darkroom to manipulate the image into what he envisioned.
For me personally, I try to edit my photos to portray what I saw with my own eyes. What the camera captured may be close, but not exact. So I do the best that I can to match that. Or if I’m feeling creative, I’ll do whatever I feel like looks the best. Did I look with my own eyes and see all the orange and blue in the clouds in the above image? Fuck no that would have been amazing. But I still love that image.