Welcome to Churchill Downs.

(From an intern’s perspective)

As a recent transplant to Kentucky, I am experiencing the Kentucky Derby for the first time. Well actually, I am experiencing racing and horses — lots of horses — for the first time. Read more

My vacation camera comes in handy

I recently bought a nice little vacation movie/still camera called the Sanyo CG6 Xacti. It’s 6 megapixels, shoots stills and MPEG4 movies, 5x optical zoom, and does a very credible job, especially for Web use. I tucked it in my pocket when I covered, using my Canon SLRs, former President Bill Clinton as he campaigned Read more

C-A-T-S and mouse

If anyone ever wonders what we photographers do between games during tournament time - well, we often turn the cameras on ourselves.
Here, UK Athletics photographer David Coyle and Courier Journal photographer Bill Luster welcome Wildcat fans to the land of Disney for the NCAA first round game in Anaheim, Ca. on March 20.[shot with Canon G9 point-and-shoot]

An international prize

The 65th annual Pictures of the Year International competition announced Monday that Herald-Leader staff photographer David Stephenson won First Place for Best Multimedia, with his entry A New Dawn. Read more

Shooting the moon

Canon MKIII, 300 mm 2.8 lens with 1.4 teleconverter (420mm equivalent). ISO 400, 3 second exposure f/6.3.

I new the lunar eclipse was happening Wednesday night, but really hadn’t given it much thought since weather reports were calling for clouds. Plus, I had a game to shoot in Richmond which would take most of my evening.

On the way to the EKU/Morehead game, though, I watched one of the more beautiful full moon rises I’ve seen recently. The skies were mostly clear as I drove down I-75 to Richmond. But the eclipse wasn’t due to start until I would be in the middle of the game. Since these things last a while, I figured I’d have a shot at it after the game.

Apparently the editors at the Herald-Leader figured I’d have a shot at it too. They called me during the game and told me to try to get something of the moon after the game. As I left the game, the moon was just about to enter into total eclipse - when the full moon passes into Earth’s shadow and is blocked form the sun’s rays that normally illuminate it.

A picture of the moon on it’s own can be quite nice, but generally we look for something else to give the photo another element. A good example of this is a nice moon-setting photo by Charles Bertram in Bourbon County in 2005.

Driving back from Richmond I saw the steeple from the White Hall Holiness Church from the interstate and was able to get to the church parking lot and check it out. Just at the time I was set up to shoot, and just as the moon had become enshrouded in Earth’s shadow, some cloud cover moved in. I had to wait about 45 minutes for the clouds to part again, and by this time it was getting past 10 p.m. and I was really pushing the limits of my deadline.

But it worked out, as you can see above, and by the time I got home, it was cloudy enough that I couldn’t see the moon anymore. And it’s too bad we won’t get another shot at seeing a total lunar eclipse until 2010.

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