A clear night sky on November 9th allowed to take some decent pictures of the total lunar eclipse.

The image is a composition of two separate pictures, the left one taken during totality, the right one a few minutes after totality with the moon moving out of Earth’s umbra. The problem with lunar eclipse photography is long exposure times. Even a bright eclipse such as this one, photographed with ISO 400 film and f/8, required 3s exposure time, which already introduces some motion blur. At 600mm the moon is moving quite fast across the frame! So for the new composition I took two circular cut-outs of the original scanned images, removing some of the horizontal motion blur and the halo of brightly iluminated part of the moon in the penumbra. For more stuff on lunar eclipse photography I highly recommend MrEclipse.com.

Hallig Gröde - Morning Light

In the morning at 5am the world’s still a complete idyll. The world being Gröde with the salt meadows, the ring dyke and the houses on the Knudswarft in the soft light just after sunrise.

Nothing disturbs the wonderful atmosphere of the early morning, only a few cows and sheep look a bit dumbfounded at the human being sneaking throught the salt meadows. Even with a camera! But it’s really worth to get up that early, the magic of the wonderful soft morning light only lasts for a short period. After that, you can go back to bed. ;-)