A Total Lunar Eclipse

Wow. It has been a tough month.
It all started with catching the flu in Victoria. That lasted a few days and all a remember is having to sit on the floor in the shower because I was too weak to stand. After getting home I then contracted phenomena and was out for the rest of the month.

To be honest, I think this was the worst I’ve ever been. No soar throat, but totally exhaustion just trying to go the toilet along with fluid buildup in the lungs was no laughing matter. Luckily, I was one of the fortunate few that managed to stay out of the hospital! It was quite an epidemic here and as luck would have it, this was the first year that I didn’t go to CES as well – not that I could have in my ‘bed-ridden’ state.

Anyway, as with most things, time was still on my side and at 4 weeks later I’ve been slowly staying on the road to recovery.

Resting gave me a lot of time to catch up on reading and learning new skills. After all, those fo you who know me, I just can’t sit still as my Brian is always going a mile a minute. One of my ‘catchups’ was for learning new photography skills with my Nikon D800. So with the lunar eclipse coming up at the end of the month, I was able to focus on a few techniques that would give me a change to try out my camera on January 31st. A total lunar eclipse!

The challenge was that the lighting would always change and that I needed to balance between clarity, sharpness, the Earth’s rotation, clouds, ISO and granular artifacts. And then there was the point that I needed to stay up for 4 hours before dawn in order to get a number of perfect shots before the moon goes below the horizon just before sunrise.

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it, since I just spend the whole month sick in bad. But when there is a will there is a way. I must admit that with all the photos I took – tweaking here and there – my photo session turned out pretty good. So much better that using an iPhone!

Well, let’s see how things go over the next few months. I’m hoping to start doing video again, as that really is a passion of mine… but photography is a lot of fun too!

Until next time…