November 29, 2004

• MOON PHOTOS and SHOTS of L.A.

  
  

  from Palos Verdes on a cold clear morning.

  
  

  

  
  

  It’s been a while since I took the camera out, and while showering yesterday morning, my fourth day off for the holidays, I saw that the full moon was showing rather brightly at six a.m, and since I was going out for breakfast, I took the camera with me. I didn’t get anything special, but am posting a selection here since I haven’t been taking too many photos lately. The shot above was taken at near 7am, and the exposure is set fairly dark.

  
  

  

  
  

  I took this one earlier but again, the exposure is adjusted darker to try to get the “moonscape”. When the exposure is at “auto” or showing the sky as bright blue as it was even early in the morning, the moon disc is merely white, and the trick is to try to get the sky blue, but still show some of the “moonscape”. As mentioned in my earlier Moonshots post last month, I do not have a 2X telephoto lens, so any “magnification” is through the digital zoom on the videocamera.

  
  

  

  
  

  The shot below is taken with the exposure set pretty high, but still you can see the “moonscape” effect, so this is a farily good photo, in terms of what I’m trying to capture. Since the “storm” the previous night was mainly wind and not too much rain, there were no clouds yesterday morning, and the sky was bright. So I looked for branches to “shoot through” to try to make the photos more interesting. Actually, the shot below has been “tweaked” in the Picture Publisher program to take out some branches that weren’t where I wanted them to be.

  
  

  

  
  

  Below is a shot of some trees lining one of the roads I was traveling. This was snapped during “reverse magic time”, when the sun was just rising, and the glow gets all golden. In film photography in the movies, “magic time” is right as the sun begins to set, when you are shooting the subject away from the sun, so the golden glow is on the subject. This is during morning, and the glow covered the trees. Even thought this isn’t a very interesting photo from an artistic point of view, there were only scant minutes in which to find something to snap, so I got these tree trunks.

  
  

  

  
  

  The bottom two photos are of the city of Los Angeles skyline shot from the top of Palos Verdes Drive North going downhill, about 30 miles away. The city looked breathtaking, and I almost decided to go on a photo expedition, but I was hungry, and went to breakfast instead. The photos do not do the view justice at all, and I wish I had a telephoto for these shots, but from so far away, the skyline looked like it was right before my eyes.

  
  

  

  
  

  Again, I experimented with the exposure control and the focus, which is set at infinity, to try to get a shot where the viewer can see what it is I’m shooting, and still have the shot look bright, since this was right as the sun was rising. Since the exposure is set fairly dark, you can’t really see the foothills in back of the skyline, which had just a bit of snow. The snow line is getting lower this year, and some of the high desert cities have seen snowfall during the past two storms.

  
  

  

  • 8:22 am
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