(I know, this is also about photographs)
Actually, you can take a good pic of the moon, set your aperture to f11, then your iso and shutter speed to about 200 and 1/200s, try and adjust as needed. Also a decent telephoto lens helps of course.
Idk if you can do that on a phone, but with a “real” camera it can be done for sure and they actually come out pretty OK.
I once shot a wedding that was scheduled around a full moon. I replaced the moon in the photos with a NASA image, color matched it, and made it like 5x bigger than the original.
Nobody noticed.
Not sure if you’re proud or chagrined that they didn’t notice. But you know that’s because you sized it right, because you were there and saw it. You made it look as magical as it felt in the moment.
Meanwhile corpo firms would have made it 50x as big because “bigger = better, right?”
There’s no subtlety in american business culture.
That’s some professional work right there.
Yep.
I hate it when people say “the human eye is 35mm” or whatever. It is not. It is black magic that paints visualizations however TF it wants, and we’re barely aware of it.
Obligatory moon:
Just bring $2200 of glass with you. No problem, bro. (Someone with an even bigger lens will surely show me up on this eventually…)
I managed to snag these back in 2021 with a Nikon P510, a superzoom mfg in 2012. Paid $35 at a thrift store! Good enough for my purposes, I suppose. My dslr is a Canon Rebel XS that I started with and now pair with a Rebel 35mm. Not trying to diminish your shot or anything, just comparing so people can see what you can still manage on a beginner budget
And this was the 2024 Solar Eclipse.
For said budgets, there are also a myriad of well established tricks such as teleconverters, gimcrack homemade contraptions involving cardboard tubes and magnifying glasses, stuffing the objective of your camera into a dime store telescope or… this friggin’ thing.
One of these days I am totally going to pick up an EF/RF mount adapter and one of those just for the yuks. I imagine the optics are godawful, but it still sounds like a good time.
Instead of a link to amazon with no preview image, would you mind including a screenshot for those of us who refuse to give Bezos the web traffic?
Oh hey, I own a XS Rebel digital and film SLR. It’s an amazing beginner camera with the right lens.
These are incredible!
This is the best I’ve got
Best i could get with my Galaxy phone when the moon was just peaking out:
The moon takes about half a degree of the sky’s arc. (So does the sun. That’s why total eclipses are possible.)
Since the horizons are 180 degrees apart, that means you could fit 360 moons in arc overhead from horizon to horizon.
Which looks impossible and demonstrates the optical illusion at play.
I brought a shot glass, but I spilled whisky on my lens
In the realm of hobbies 2200 isn’t so bad. Though I guess if it’s like camera lens it can go to the moon pretty quick.
You still need a camera body to attach it to. But yes, you can indeed spend any amount of money on lenses if you put your mind to it. And if you’ve decided you haven’t spent enough, you can always shoot yourself in the foot by picking up a camera that belongs to a different lens ecosystem than what you’ve already got and then start building up a pile of lenses for that…
it can go to the moon pretty quick.
I see what you did there.
It’s because the actual sky is so large. When you look at the moon in real life, your eye focuses on it so it takes up more of your visual field. Try looking straight up and doing a 360° and you’ll notice just how large the sky actually is.
When you photograph the moon, especially with a wide-angle lense, it doesn’t fill the visual field as much because it maintains the objective proportions of everything within it, and projects that onto a flat image. So when you see it on a screen, it looks smaller because you hadn’t previously noticed how small the moon is relative to the sky itself.
I swear with hills too, I can be standing infront of a thousand foot slope and the camera makes it look like you could throw a rock over it.
It’s ok. The demon that lives in my camera has the same problem.
Why can’t they paint it the way they see it? Usually the issue is photographs never capture what it looks like, but when painting it’s your perception that’s the reference.
I think that’s the joke.
When a life long romantic faces reality they get upset.
When a life long realist is confronted by feelings of real romance, they very well may want to die when they also face the reality of it.
Be happy to be dumb enough to be in the first camp if you are.
