Saturday, February 27, 2010

Photo: What Is It? (The Answer)

So, I put up the picture shown below and asked people what they thought it was. One last chance to take a guess before looking at the answer below:



Canon XSi, 75-300mm lens at 75mm, f/11, 30 seconds.


Last week, I was riding in a car on the Belt Parkway at night. I looked out the window and saw the crescent moon hanging in the sky. I decided to try to get the picture.

In reality, I knew even before I started that it was a futile effort. The road was bumpy, it was late at night and I didn't have a tripod to steady the shot (not that it would have helped because of the bouncing the car was doing). Nonetheless, I decided "what the heck," attached my zoom lens, pointed the camera out the window and opened the shutter.

I kept the shutter opened for 30 seconds, hoping to catch some part of the moon. The picture above is the result. The lights you see are streaks of light* from street lights, headlights and various buildings in the background as we drove by.

As it turns out, I *did* manage to get the moon in my picture. It's the wispy, smoky part of the image in the lower right corner.

The moral of the story: You never know what you're going to get and (at least with digital) it always pays to shoot liberally. I knew I had no real chance of getting a nice moon shot, but because I decided to try anyway, I ended up with a very different type of image.

The Wolf

* I discussed how to make light trails in this post.

5 comments:

Zach Kessin said...

A point to remember the moon is a sunlit grey rock. Even though it may be night when you are looking at it it is in daylight.

I managed some very nice moon shots a while ago by using my telescope as a F15 1900mm lens. I am planning more but probably not until summer.
I'm planning to do them with fine grained B&W film

Steg (dos iz nit der šteg) said...

that's very cool

KJ said...

That is really a nice photographic effect, even if you didn't get what you were aiming for.

Unknown said...

its tzitzis that you took out when you blessed the moon

Proud MO said...

It looks like a Van Gogh painting.