The Moon

Tonight I learned how to shoot a moon lit sky. The challenge was with the white balance. I wanted the sky to look blue as I saw it. So I used the Tungsten white balance and it gave me exactly the effect I wanted. This shot was taken with my wide angle lens 16-35mm at 35mm. I like the feel it leaves you with.

It was full moon that night and I wanted to document the beauty of the scene. I used my my 70-200mm lens at 200mm first to shoot the moon on its own (photo below). It is a nice zoom where the moon stands right in the middle of the photo.



The slow exposure (4-5 sec) in both photos helped copying the colors as I saw them that night. I may have tried longer exposures though. Next time I want to try the bulb and see how it looks. I also want to highlight how big the moon felt in the sky. The wide angle lens didn't help at all in giving this feeling. Maybe I should try around the 100mm.

Towards Getty (Day 1)

Today I was trying to take a nice shot of a cup of coffee.
The setup:
- Camera in front. Around 2 meters from the subject.
- Flash (Canon Speedlite 580 EX II) 45 degrees to the left of the subject. Head is almost at the same level as the subject. It's shot through a diffuser (white reflector)
- A silver reflector is held on the opposite side to the flash head to reflect the light back to the subject.
- A black screen is put at a 45 degrees to the right behind the subject in order to block any light from the window next to the table.
Comments:
- Need to add more sharpness to the cup. Will try to increase the depth of field.
- Need to get rid of the glare on the cup. It's tiny but I think it would be better if we eliminate it.
- Need to make the newspaper less blurry
- Need to light the cup almost evenly and eliminate the shadows.

Tomorrow I'll try to repeat the experiment taking into consideration the comments above.

Just to Start

I like the composition in this shot. I took it last week while we were on the beach. The sun wasn't too harsh and I wanted to try my new 70-200 lens. I feel it's a bit shaky though. I need to get used to the weight of my camera with this heavy lens on.