The full worm moon rising upon a hill in Santa Barbara, CA. Most of the time, close to the sunset, weather gets hazy on the Pacific coast because of all the water vapor that gets created during the day from the harsh illumination caused by sun. So, when I set my camera up for this shot, I was not that hopeful from the beginning. Then, all of a sudden, clouds appeared over the horizon and I fell into a feeling of despair! But again, like many other times that I have been surprised, I was surprised with the weather. Moon started rising just from behind the cloud and kept moving in and out of the clouds and eventually came all the way out and illuminated the sky. The whole sequence was phenomenal, because it happened during the Blue hour, when the sky is having a faint blue tint due to sun being between -4 and -6 degrees below the horizon. The moon being extremely yellow and the sky being blue and purple, lead to a surprisingly beautiful scene. The time stamps on the images from the left to the right are 7:01:22, 7:01:48, 7:02:31, 7:02:51, 7:03:09, 7:03:50, and 7:12:21 PM. You can see how much the moon moves across the images in a such a short amount of time. I love the reflection of moon light in the last photo, it is surreal!
I like to say that I can top this photo, but it may take a very long time for me to top this photo of a beautiful lunar eclipse and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco. I have taken many photos of the Milky Way galaxy and challenging panoramas, but none came close to the challenges that I experienced while taking this lunar eclipse sequence. The exposure time and ISO levels on the camera were drastically different from one lunar eclipse phase to the other and I had to constantly change the camera settings. Even worse, I was zoomed in and the moon was moving so fast through my 200-mm lens that I could not use a long shutter speed to allow in more light. So, I had to bump up the ISO to some crazy levels (I think I had it at 10000 or so) and take 100 shots of each phase. Remember that noise is random, so, when you take 100 shots and then align them, noise pixels will get averaged out and your final image will be much less noisy. Don’t be afraid of bumping up the ISO, just know what you are doing. By the way, this is a composite image, meaning, I had to take the moon shots with a different focal length and somewhere away from the San Francisco’s light pollution. Then I used augmented reality to see the moon trajectory over the Golden Gate bridge and saw that I had to deviate the moon trajectory, from what it was, to make it fit in the image. So, the photo is semi-Photoshopped. You may say why did I say this? Well, it is a very good practice to tell the truth about a photo to not set unrealistic expectations.