How to Photograph the Lunar Eclipse & Lessons I Learnt Photographing the Lunar Eclipse

I'll be talking about 

(1) How to photograph a lunar eclipse

(2) Mistakes I made and you would not want to make.

Photographing the Lunar Eclipse

The equipment you will need is varied - anything from a smartphone to a telescope. But one essential tool is a Tripod, without which, it is quiet hard to photograph the eclipse.

 

(it wasn't actually that bright - my phone made it look bright when i used the night mode to capture this pic)

 

 

So, I went ahead using the Nikon P950.

 

The general idea is to photograph the moon through various phases of the eclipse and then make a moon trail.

Assuming this, I got wide angle shots of the sky with the moon, around 24mm on my P950, If i remember correctly.

 

This was my First Mistake. Go for Zoomed In Shots. 

In post processing, i basically selected a few shots from the entire sequence, removed their backgrounds, and arranged them on a new file with a black background.

Because I had taken wide angle shots, the moon was covering a fairly small fraction of the sensor, so i got pretty low resolution images of the moon.

 

 

 

My Second Mistake - not using Exposure Bracketing.

While Photographing the moon, ALWAYS USE EXPOSURE BRACKETING.  

If you can see the 7th and 8th image of the sequence - from the banner image, you would notice it being pretty terrible - even with the detail.

I had exposed for the first few phases and just left the camera on interval shooting. This over exposed the moon, when it got brighter. And under-exposing it in post processing was a PAIN (and didn't work well :( ). That is why those two phases are pretty terrible, and have bad detail.

 

Speaking of Which, USE INTERVAL SHOOTING.

Instead of you manually clicking every now and then, which would not give you a bunch of images at equal intervals - meaning each phase would not be equidistant from the prior or latter.

 

Mistake No 3 - Not taking a photo of the sky.

Take a Photo of the Blank Sky 

Once you are done photographing the eclipse, take a photo of the sky - not too over exposed, nor under exposed - you will be using this as the background to your final image. 

As I mentioned Earlier, I missed this part and used a black background - which looks good but isn't soo natural, and doesn't look Great. 

 

Post Processing

Welcome to the most dreaded part of photography by every photographer.

I'll just be telling how to do it - not in detail.

 

So, now that you have a bunch of images from your interval shooting, 

 

Select good images from roughly equal intervals of time. 

Remove the background for these images.

Paste them on the diagonal of the background (image of the empty sky).

AND YOU ARE DONE!!! 

 

Miscellaneous Notes 

1) Shoot in Manual Mode 

2) Use the Lowest ISO Possible

3) Open the Aperture to the Widest.

4) To Calculate the Shutter speed, use the NPF Rule.