Bill Pekala
Bill Pekala: Moon Shots
The total lunar eclipse at the end of October was for many photographers and sky watchers an exciting invitation to photography. All you needed was a long lens and clear weather. Unlike a solar eclipse, which requires viewing precautions, a lunar eclipse is safe to watch and to photograph.
A total lunar eclipse, which occurs only when there's a full moon, happens when the earth blocks the sunlight that's normally reflected by the moon. At totality, the sunlight, bent by the earth's atmosphere, gives the moon a red-orange glow.
Bill Pekala, General Manager of Professional and Technical Services for Nikon, didn't have to go far to get the photos that he assembled into the composite image you see here. Less than five minutes from his suburban New York home was the flat field of a potato farm. "I drove into the field, parked the car, set up the tripod and waited for it to happen," Bill says.
Well, it wasn't quite that simple—but it wasn't too difficult, either, because Bill made all the right decisions—and he had the right gear: a D1X, a 300mm f/2.8D ED-IF II AF-S Nikkor, a TC-20E II 2x AF-S teleconverter and "a serious tripod." With the teleconverter, the 300mm lens effectively functions as a 600mm—and the longer the focal length of the telephoto, the bigger the moon in the frame. And a fast lens will help you capture the moon at the low light levels near totality. "You want to be able to open the aperture to get your exposure rather than slow the shutter speed drastically," Bill says, "because at long exposures you'll get the movement of the moon and the earth." To keep movement of the camera to a minimum, he used a remote cable release.
So, how do you handle exposures for a lunar eclipse? "Well," Bill says, "your starting point for a full moon is remarkably similar to the formula you'd use for a bright sunny day: one over the ISO at f/16." Bill set his ISO at 250 on the D1X, so his first exposure was 1/250 second at f/16. Actually, he set 1/500 at f/11, which gave him the same relationship of f/stop and shutter speed and lots of latitude in his speed settings. He shot the first two images at that setting.
"My rule of thumb from then on was a one-quarter eclipse needs one stop more light, half eclipse another stop, three-quarter eclipse is three stops." The 9:30PM exposure was f/11 at 250; 9:50PM, f/11 at 125; 10:00PM, f/11 at 1/60. "At 10:10PM it was getting pretty dark, so all bets were off, and I started bracketing the exposures." From then on he opened up the lens and boosted the ISO rather than slow the shutter speed—"there was some wind that might shake the camera." The 11:04PM exposure was 1/4 second at f/4 and ISO 3200. Of course, the great advantage with digital is that you can see the results right away, so there was plenty of time to make exposure adjustments.
He had planned on taking the entire sequence, from full moon to total eclipse and back again, but at totality the weather stopped cooperating. "A lot of clouds blew in, and that was pretty much it."
What was left to do was to download the NEF (Nikon Electronic File) images (Bill shot 60 photos in all), make minor adjustments in Nikon Capture software and, using Photoshop, assemble the best of the pictures into a composite. Bill chose to shoot in the NEF format so he'd have maximum control over any image adjustments he might need to make. The NEF makes all the file information and image attributes available for changes and adjustments without actually affecting the original material. "If you save original files as JPEGs or TIFFs right out of the camera, you lose the option of having an untouched original," Bill says of the NEF advantage. "But if I missed a little on the exposure, I could go into the NEF and tweak the image. I didn't miss by very much—at most I adjusted the tonality range here and there in Capture."
