Shooting the moon
February 20, 2008
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.
Friends in low places!
February 16, 2008
Photo by Bill Feig
I am in Baton Rouge right now having shot the UK-LSU game this afternoon. An old friend of mine, Kevin Martin, is now a photo editor at the Baton Rouge Advocate. Kevin has only been here for about 5 months and lucky for me he was around this weekend. Read more
Super Month!
February 15, 2008
February has been a big month for me. I shot my third Super Bowl, with the Giants beating the Patriots (thank goodness), had my first photo show of some of my Rock and Roll photos, and now I am in Baton Rouge for the first time to shoot UK-LSU! Now if I could just figure out how to put a photo into this blog I would be hitting on all cylinders.
It is kind of funny really how quickly the technology changes and how confusing it can be. I feel like I am fairly proficient on the computer and I even do my own webpage, but I still have to play catch up all the time on this new stuff. This blog is now done through a system called Wordpress. I’m sure it is much better than the old system or else we wouldn’t have changed to it but the differences are not readily apparent right now to me, especially since it was so easy to insert a photo in the old version and I don’t see how to do it on this one….frustrating!
Oh what a feeling!
January 12, 2008
I just finished shooting the UK-Vanderbilt game in Rupp Arena. The game went great and ended up going to double overtime with UK winning 79-73. It literally came down to a last second shot two different times and that REALLY gets the blood pumping making sure you get “The Shot”. I had two decent shots of Ramel Bradley’s half court launches but in the end Kentucky pulled away for the win so there was no “shot” to be got!
I was actually excited to shoot this game for a number of reasons. The biggest reason being I was able to do the game with still cameras. (David Perry was heading up the video duty for this game.) I felt like I was in a position to do what I do and do it well. We are all still learning the video part of the job. It is a big change and , while I am working on getting better at it, the posted video has yet to give me the joy and feel of having a killer photo in the next days paper. Even the slide show was fun to make because I had a good shoot and I knew the paper would not have enough room for all of it. The slide shows let us get it all out there for all to see!
Dave and I were almost the last people to leave the UK press room. Only Jerry Tipton remained hammering out his final version of the game story on deadline. The game ended at about 5:30 or so ( I am guessing) and it was around 8:00 that we got out of there. The slide show was up, and Dave’s video was rendering and exporting. This would take about an hour to do so me and Dave grabbed a bite to eat while his computer churned out the video.
At the time of this note, Dave probably still has another hour or so to get the video posted but for now, there is a pretty decent slide show of the game here! Check it out!
Heraldleaderphoto.com wins a 2007 Media Eclipse Award
January 4, 2008
The NTRA today announced that the Lexington Herald-Leader’s multimedia website, Heraldleaderphoto.com, has won the 2007 Eclipse Award for Media in the Audio/Multi-media Internet category for the paper’s coverage of the 2007 Kentucky Derby. Read more
