Day: March 2, 2012

I thought I’d continue with a celestial color theme on the blog today and in a way, the moon, as the earth’s satellite, could quality for the “earth, wind, or fire” challenge if you stretch things just a bit. When I went off to get the mail, the sky was a brilliant blue and the moon was brilliant as well. I set up the tripod on the front lawn and used the remote trigger to prevent jiggling the long lens. I cropped the photo then added some curves and some levels to make the contrast more dramatic and to make the moon’s craters more prominent resulting in this very blue moon. I realize this really isn’t a “blue moon” because they only occur, well, once in a blue moon, and the current moon phase is waxing gibbous, 68%, not full. I’ll try to remember that the next real blue moon will occur this year on August 31 and feature it on the blog. The last blue moon was on December 31, 2009. Oh, a blue moon is when a second full moon occurs within the same calendar month.

Today I had plans to practice custom white balance settings that Melinda showed me yesterday, but before I had a chance to do it successfully, I noticed a pair of doves out in the yard. The daily challenge topic for today is “earth, wind, or fire” and since doves tend to blend into their surroundings because of their earth tones, I attached my 70-300 zoom and went out to see what I could capture. I managed to get a couple of in focus shots but they were poorly exposed so I waited to see if the hummingbird would pose for me. While I looked for the hummer, I noticed my fountain needed water so I stuck the hose in to fill it and idly took a few experimental shots using the on camera flash. The fountain is a sort of earth tone despite its being made of resin and not stone. When I turned off the flash and took a few more photos, I was stunned to see the images in my LCD screen. The photos were anything but earth tones. In fact, they could have come from Mars, the red planet. The next three photos of the fountain were magenta. I gasped, ran inside, downloaded the photos and am now awaiting a response from Nikon to see if this is something I need to worry about or if it was just a digital glitch that won’t happen again.

Here is one of the mars toned photos SOOC, and the earth toned dove whose exposure I tweaked using levels.