Sunrise and Moonrise plus Dunstan
I was up early this morning and ended up shooting both the sun and moon rise. I’d be curious to know how often the sun and moon rise in the same quadrant of the sky. It’s a bit hard to see in this first picture, but the moon is rising in the upper right corner (moonrise was at 4:21 a.m.1, sunrise wasn’t until 6:46 a.m.). I don’t often say this, but I’d recommend you click on the pictures to see the bigger version (click on the picture, then click on All Sizes, then click on the size you want to see).
With the two sunrise images, I also tried using a new filter technique. I was looking to mimic a graduated ND filter so I could get a nice range of color in the sky. Fortunately, Lightroom has such a graduated filter. I applied the filter, dropped the expose a bit, and all was good.
In case you’re wondering, the crop ratio for the sunrise photos is 2.39:1. I’ve always had an issue with cropping. How much is too much? How much is too little? How does cropping in post affect how I take pictures? I decided to take an engineering approach and setup several predefined crop ratios that I would work with. I typically just stick with the native aspect ratio of my camera, 3:2; I also sometimes use a 1:1 ratio. After working with videography in high school, I really liked using the widescreen ratios, so I also use 16:9 (typical HDTV ratio) and 2.39:1 (typical anamorphic ratio…aka Panavision). There are a couple of other ratios I use, but the aforementioned ratios are the ones I use most of the time.
With Dunstan, I was testing out some new photographic gear I got for my birthday, mainly my new umbrella and Cactus Wireless Flash trigger. I decided to try it out on the only subject I had available at the time, Dunstan, my cat.
Nikkor @ 18mm || 1/15 || f/5.0 || ISO200 || tripod
Nikkor @ 18mm || 1/100 || f/13.0 || ISO200 || tripod
Nikkor @ 70mm || 1/200 || f/4.5 || ISO200 || shoot through umbrella off-camera @ 1/8