Super Blood Wolf Moon - Let's Practice Photography

I'm not sure if you heard the news or not, but tonight (1/20/19) was a Super Blood Wolf Moon. Super because it is relatively close to earth in its orbit. Blood because there was a Lunar eclipse. Wolf moon is the fancy name for a full moon in January. I decided it would be a great time to practice some digital photography.

Outdoors.

At night.

In 34 degree weather.

This may sound like Greek (geek?) to you. Stick it out. I've just started learning this stuff myself, and would love any photographers to double check my understanding here. The following images were shot on my wife's Nikon D3400. None of them have been edited at all. I do have the raw files, but these are the JPGs. I used manual mode with the shutter at 1/250, f11, 250ISO for the first images. I used her 70-300mm lens fully zoomed in. I let autofocus do its thing. put the camera on a tripod, and set it to snap five pictures after a 10 second delay. As the eclipse progressed, and there was less light available, I dropped the shutter speed, raised the ISO, and lowered the apeture setting. Basically I just played with stuff until I got these images, and I think that's the best way to start learning to use a digital camera well. Here's a recap of what I learned tonight. If I learned something incorrect, please drop a comment to correct me (politely.)

Shutter is the measurement of how long the shutter allows light to hit the image sensor. 1/250 means that the shutter will be opened for one 250th of a second. As the eclipse progressed, and there was less light available, I had to slow down the shutter to allow more light to hit the sensor. The final picture was shot somewhere around a 1/3 shutter speed. Having a tripod is vital at slow shutter speeds.

Aperture (f-stop) is the measure of how wide the aperture opens. This one seems to confuse people... myself included. Lower numbers are wider apertures. This has an impact on the amount of light that hits the sensor, but also the depth of field of the picture. If you want your subject in focus, but the back and foregrounds blurred, you can set your aperture to a higher numerical setting... right? Someone fact-check me on this one. For these pictures, I started at f11, and I think I ended up around f7 for the lowest light images during the eclipse.

ISO is a measure of the sensitivity of the sensor (film) in your camera. Lower numbers make the sensor less sensitive to light, but generally less noisy. Higher ISO numbers allow more light to be captured, but tend to give the picture a more grainy look. For the eclipse, I began at 250, but ended up closer to 800 for the final dark pictures.

This has been a great opportunity for me to spend some time in quiet contemplation while enjoying one of nature's wonders, and beginning to learn a new skill at the same time.

Thanks for reading, and for your continued support.
Today is a great day to make the world a better place.