Today was my first day back at work after a couple of weeks holiday, so I had to carefully consider whether to interrupt by beauty sleep to stand outside in the cold and look at the moon or not. I didn’t want to look worse after the holiday than I did before it, but at the end of the day I couldn’t resist the temptation. So, with the help of all my alarm clocks, we sprang spritely out of bed at 3.30 am and peered out of the window. The moon wasn’t completely eclipsed at that time, but there was not a cloud to be seen so returning to bed was not an option.
It wasn’t until I stood in the garden staring skywards, with a cup of tea in one hand and the cable release in the other, that I was confronted with the various shortcomings of my photo kit; My old 80 – 200mm zoom is basically fine, but not automatic and a bit small for this type of work so there were various things to consider… perhaps a new one one day? My reasonably priced tripod is OK but not very ‘precise’ and it wobbled quite alarmingly when the heavy zoom was mounted on the K30. Then there was the question of experience, these sort of things don’t happen on a daily basis and I had to grope around in the dark for the important buttons and a lot of guesswork was needed for the exposures. More practice would have certainly been beneficial. But despite all the things that could be improved I was fairly happy with one or two of the images.
