2014—Blood Moon

It was appropriate, I guess, that while I spent the late night and early morning hours photographing the Blood Moon, I watched the final two episodes of “Dexter” with all its blood and gore. It set the mood.

And I set a timer for every ten minutes to go out and take another couple of shots until the eclipse was total and the moon was about to be completely bloodied, then I stayed out until I couldn’t really see it much anymore and my photos weren’t turning out. I couldn’t use the camera’s intervelometer to take photographs at timed intervals which was my first thought, because the moon was moving across the sky as the eclipse was developing and had I left the camera unattended, I would have had lots of photos of the blank sky. The moon didn’t look blood red to my naked, myopic eyes, only slightly reddish with lots of shadow. I could see just a tinge of color but I kept having to twiddle with the exposure in camera to get that blood red color; it was late, I was sleepy, and I kept turning the dials the wrong way, giving me less color rather than more. I finally got it almost right, but they still needed a tiny bit of adjustment in post processing. Focus was difficult because the moon was so dim at the height of the eclipse.

The first shot is the moon about a half hour before the eclipse was predicted to start but there is already a shadow starting to shade the moon. The second shot is just a couple of minutes after the eclipse was considered total and the third shot is about 40 minutes into the eclipse. I used my 70-200mm lens and the D7100. These shots are cropped.