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9:53 now, the moon is 2 minutes out of totality, but still very much in shadow...obviously. It was dark enough I could barely see the hill or trees through my lens. I think I just guessed with this one. I am pulled off the road, parked on this little pull off they have to look out east. It's not real wide, but it's enough. I have the tripod setup outside the car again. My parking lights are on in this one, which is why the hill is red. In all these I really didn't care if I blew out the orange moon, since the scene in general was the most important aspect. This is really the only time you can get a shot like the above. Even a crescent moon will rapidly blow out and then you aren't left with a nice small disc. This route you can get the disc, since it is so dim, and get the stars, all without having a big blow out blob of a disc. I probably should have came down to this spot a little sooner and done more with the moon completely in totality from here. Then again, it's barely above the treetops now as it is.
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Hardly any of that moon is bright right now. You get much of it back out of totality and it rapidly blows out(at least when you shoot for the rest of the scene to show up). The important part right now is that it is not too far out of totality yet. The more it returns from Earth's shadow, the dimmer the stars get. So I was now racing that whole aspect with this very cool scene. It's 10:00 in this shot, only 9 minutes out of totality. Totality ended at 9:51 and all eclipsing ends at 11:09. So there's 78 minutes the moon goes from completely shadowed to none. This shot is 9 minutes into that. 78 divided by 9 is 8.6. So less than 10% of the moon is illuminated in the above. This was taken at F4, 800 ISO, for 50 seconds.....using the 17-40L for a bit now...not long before I toss the 10-22 back on. |
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A car comes around the corner and I just hope it is in the frame. It is but just barely. Too bad I didn't get a better angle for that! I looked at the lcd and was like, well that sucks! Now I really wanted another car on this largely carless road.
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You're going the wrong way! F3.5, 400 ISO, 96 seconds. 10:12....moon is 21 minutes past totality.
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F3.5, 400 ISO, 229 seconds. This scene looked a lot cooler with my parking lights on, so I turned them back on. Notice the cirrus to the south, stuck in that spot over Blair...glad I came up here. Now if only I could get one more car to come from the west, now that I have it framed right for it. I sit there for a while shooting, and it's just not happening. Drats! I'm losing stars by the minute, as the moon gets brighter.
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So I'm sitting here getting frustrated at the lack of cars(that's something new). I think to myself, it's too bad a friend or two didn't come up here in another car, as I could just have them drive down the road for me. Then I thought, hey, I do have a car! It would just require a timed shutter instead of bulb, and me leaving my camera for a bit as I drove away. So I set it to 400 ISO, F3.5 and that 30 second shutter(longest I can get without using bulb). I couldn't use the cable release and bulb by locking the switch, because it would then have me driving back to the camera and my headlights screwing things up. So I set it, then squeezed between my tripod/camera and that guard rail(lovely edge over there)...cable release in hand. Once I was to the end of my cable, I got ready to drive...pushed the button and took off. I had 30 seconds to get over there and down and around the corner(it gets sharp and twisty over there).
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So I flip around down there and come back. I wasn't real happy with the first one, since my head lights being on killed some of the red from my tail lights(they exposed the ground/road too bright as I drove away, even with them pointing away from the camera). So I do it again, same settings, but this time I pull out with just my parking lights on till I got closer to the corner. This time my tires were spinning in the gravel before I got onto the pavement. You can tell it stirred up some dust since the red area is down to the pavement here. It made for a cool scene, that's for sure. Hmmm, now that I think about it I should have tried to peel out and kick up a ton of dirt. Then there'd be a big cloud of red here where I left.
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Getting tired and sick of the cold(I mean freaking cold....shooting at 0F ain't that fun) I begin the drive home. The moon was probably half out of the shadow now anyway. I stop at the Burger King at Missouri Valley around 11:00. I'm guessing I left that drive-thru around 11:10, at the very end of the whole eclipse. I was now in that area of cirrus, since I drove south into it. I'm heading west on 30 towards home when I notice some horribly cool looking cirrus formations. They were arranged in strange lines at times. My images of those largely suck since I had to ISO up to 1600 to get them before they moved. Anyway, after I took the first one and looked at the lcd I saw a curve in them. I was like, that looks like a halo. I lean out the window and actually look up, and there was a big ol moon halo now. This made for quite the scene on a longer exposure. It was almost as if they moon wasn't done showing off. It was sort of saying, "hello I'm still here"....since this was literally right at the end of the eclipse. The above was at F3.5, 100 ISO, for 96 seconds.
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After finishing my food, I of course had to jump into a shot or two. You can see some of the cooler fanning shapes to them in this one(right through and below the moon). Cool ending to a fun night. I'm not nearly as tall as this makes me look. That 10mm stretches things near the edge a bit.
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