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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Daily P5. This is episode 151 for Monday, January 21st, 2019. It's 9.30 pm on the East Coast, and I wanted to talk a little bit about last night's Super Blood Wolf Moon.
I think that's what they're calling it. The big lunar eclipse that happened, and kind of one of the big, actually two mistakes that I made. So if you follow me on social media, you see I blasted out three pictures of this thing one right before. It started the big glowing bright white full moon, and then a couple where the partial eclipse led up to the three quarter eclipse, and then nothing.
So the first mistake that I made, well first of all, let me talk about a little bit about my setup. So this one's going to be all heavy photography talk for all my photography listeners out there. So I actually shot these in my front yard on a tripod on my Nikon D500 was the camera body. And then attached to it, I had a Nikon 200 to 500 zoom lens.
And of course, I used a remote trigger for that. So the first picture I took, the one that's the full bright full moon. So cameras on tripod, I have this thing wound all the way out to 500 millimeters. And I'm using ISO 100 F 11.
And my shutter speed was one 125th of a second. And so I was able to get good focus. Cameras pointed up at about a 45 degree angle to get the moon, cracked off those shots, immediately came in and edited these pictures. You know, I thought they were great, you know, cool, whatever.
So I kind of left everything on the tripod. And then I was watching this live stream of the blood moon on YouTube. And so as soon as I could start to see the shadowing over the moon is when I went out and took the next picture and brought those dozen or so, of course, there goes the ambulance. And that's why you hear a siren in the background.
But so I bring that second round of pictures in and start editing them and I'm realizing there's something wrong. Like it doesn't look as close as the previous set of pictures did. And so now I'm wondering what in the world is wrong and going on, because I have it wound all the way out to 500 millimeters. It's just there's something wrong.
None of the pictures look right. So then I wait and go back out for the second round of pictures, take those come back in and again, the same problem. They just they look like crap that the moon seems too far away on a 500 millimeter zoom. And so then I go out for the third time.
And now I find out and realize what the problem is, because now the camera is pointing at a 90 degree angle straight up in the air. Like I'm literally down on my knees in the snow looking up into the camera viewfinder to take these pictures. And that's when I discovered that on this lens, this gigantic 200 to 500 millimeters zoom lens that weighs probably seven or eight pounds. When it's standing upright like that, and you have it wound out to 500 millimeters, the weight of the lens actually causes it to start to wind the zoom back in.
So now all of these pictures are being taken at 300 millimeters instead of 500 millimeters, because it's just, it's just slowly turning itself back down to 300, which is where it eventually stopped when it was standing upright. And there's nothing I can do about it because there's no lock to lock the lens up. Now there's a lock when you're carrying the lens, when it's on 200 millimeters, you can lock it so that you don't accidentally zoom the lens out. But when it's, excuse me, when it's zoomed all the way out to 500, you can't lock that lens off.
So that sucked right off the bat, because even as I'm trying to hold it at 500, just me holding it, there was still too much camera shake for my hand touching the lens. So I had to shoot the last one, the three quarter one at, I guess it was 300 after it wound itself back in. But then the next problem is, is I'm sitting there watching it on the video, and it's getting to its peak of where it's starting to turn red. And everyone's posting that it's red on social media, because I'm watching it on Twitter too.
And so I go outside and it's literally snow squall blinding snow. I never checked the radar because it was such a clear night that I assumed it was going to be clear in 20 minutes. And lo and behold, you know, the magic of western Pennsylvania weather as we all found out over the weekend is the weather can change at the snap of a finger. And in those 20 minutes, I walked out into a snow squall and blinding snow and cloud cover and could not see the moon.
So came back in, I'm watching this on YouTube, decided to go back out again and take a look. And because I could see on the radar that the snow would stop. So I went back out, still had all of this cloud coverage, like you couldn't see this guy anymore. And it was this weird lower cloud cover.
I don't, I don't get one would be so disappointed in me, because I don't know what kind of clouds they were. But it was completely clouded over. And the moon was glowing red above it. And it was causing this red glow onto the clouds, which was kind of coming through the clouds.
And I thought, this is so cool to be able to stand here and see this phenomenon happening right in front of me. And I went to take a picture of it. And unfortunately, right across the street from my place is a pizza shop with red glowing lights everywhere. And so when I took the picture, those red glowing lights of the pizza shop kind of drowned out that ambient red light of the blood moon coming through the clouds.
So I have no picture of that to show anyone. But trust me, it was one of the coolest things to be able to see the sky illuminated like that. And it was freezing, bitter cold. And again, lessons learned.
This is, this is why, you know, if your photographer go out and shoot, shoot every day, shoot around your house, learn your gear. Because obviously, this is something that I missed. I've owned this lens for about a year and never realized that that was a thing or that that was a problem that the, that the zoom on the lens would start to wind itself back down whenever you put it at a certain angle. But you know, what are you going to do?
You know, lesson learned, that's, that's the name of the game of photography. It's shooting learn for a reason. And you know, last night was no exception. But you know, I like the pictures I got.
I mean, I think they're okay. You know, it's certainly not my best moon work. But again, I think I captured the moment and preserved it good enough for me to be able to look back on it and remember what the lunar eclipse looked like on January 21st. So anyways, that's it.
That's the end of my rant for today. Oh, and a big shout out to my mom who just got out of the hospital again today. If you remember, on Christmas day, I had posted that she was in the hospital for 10 days and got to come home just before Christmas. Unfortunately, a week ago, she went back into the hospital and she was in for another week.
And she called me today to say she was finally being discharged. So I know she listens to these podcasts. So welcome home. Mummy.
I love you tremendously. And that's it. 412-701-4323 is the show. Call the number paulfalebletopodcast.com.
Thanks for listening.