I recently arrived back from an almost two-week vacation down to Myrtle Beach and Disney World. While not completely “off the grid”, aside from a daily email check and a couple of blog comments, I pretty much unplugged. I gave the camera a decent workout with a few hundred snapshots just downloaded onto the pc tonight. Highlights? Space Mountain, my daughter having fun fun fun, and a visit to Kennedy Space Center.
This is really just a check in post while I unwind (yes, I know a vacation is supposed to unwind me, but it never seems to work out that way) and slip back into ‘normal’ mode once again, a little more refreshed and recharged. There will be a few more photos likely posted, but here are two for now:
I’ve tried moon shots before and have never been satisfied. But one night this past week, looking out onto the Atlantic, the full moon seemed somewhat dimmer than your typical bright shiny full moon, so I thought I’d give it a try. Handholding my 300mm lens fully extended, ISO 100, and F5.6 at 1/125, I braced the lens against the balcony railing and fired off 3 or 4 shots. Suprisingly, a couple of them seemed fairly sharp when I reviewed them. Here’s the full shot and a 1:1 crop of the moon to show you some actual detail instead of the washed out mess that my previous attempts have always produced:
Here’s the 1:1 crop of the moon itself:
And of course, another shot I liked getting was this restaurant’s sign along Hwy 17 which made me laugh. It may not appeal to those of you without a grade school sense of humour like myself 
- but for me it made for at least 10 minutes of quality bathroom humour.
Har! Restaurant, saloon, roadwear, cycles, accessories…everything but the kitchen sink! And a sophomoric name, to boot!
Very nice moon pic, Richard.
Nice. Welcome back from Vacation.
I tried my hand at some moon shots during the full eclipse, also with a 300mm lens fully extended on a tripod, but did not get NEAR the clarity you did…
Good enough for me to use it as a desktop background for my laptop, but I would have loved to have gotten that sharpness you got…
I always forget to change the ISO setting. I change it when I’m having a hard time working with the light, but then I totally forget to dial it back to avoid noise, since I don’t see the noise until after a shoot at my computer…
Hey Simon,
Yeah, I was quite suprised to find a decent image when I opened it up on my PC. Usually they look ok on the tiny LCD on the camera and then turn out to be crappy when I import them. But hey, you can get lucky sometimes I guess!
Speaking of camera setting blunders, I turned off AF on my lens (setting it to manual focus) to take a couple of shots on a very dark ride in Disney and of course forgot. Then I handed the camera to my wife to take a few shots with my daughter and a Disney character - Goofy I think. It wasn’t until about 6 shots and an hour later that I actually used the camera again myself and realized that the AF was not working!! Luckily it only meant 6 blurry shots. My wife doesn’t use my camera enough to notice the lack of the AF beeping and little red focus lights in the viewfinder. Needless to say she wasn’t pleased with me.