The Moon

I've shown a few moon shots over the last months. The first one was when I showed how I print very large images in this blog entry. That moon was shot with the D2Hs 4.1mp camera and cropped about 50%. I used the Nikon 300mm F4 AF-S telephoto lens with the Nikon TC17e teleconverter for an effective focal length of 500mm. Add to that the 1.5x crop factor of the DX image sensor, and we have an effective focal length of 750mm in old 35mm camera terms.


Next, I showed the moon in eclipse. I really had problems getting a decent shot because I had a world class brain-fart and left the shutter speed too long. Thus, my exposures were ok, but the moon was blurred by movement through the sky (yes, I forgot that the moon moved :-) ...

Incidentally, this was the last series of images I shot before trading my D2Hs in on the D300. It's a little sad that it simply stunk ... but at least I can prove that I was there and saw the total eclipse of 2008.


More recently, people have been posting moon images taken by the Fujifilm S100fs, which is a bridge cam with 11mp and decent high ISO. A pretty nice camera for certain kinds of images. Tony Wong has a gallery on pbase full of images like this. These are pretty detailed for bridge cam images with add on teleconverters. In fact, he has several galleries with some of the best images yet posted from that camera.

Now to the real point of this article. If you want to see a moon shot that will blow your mind with spectacular detail and colour, look no further than this image shot by Michael A. Stecker using a research grade 11mp CCD called the SBIG STL-11000M on a Cassegrain telescope. This image can be seen here.

I will link to this image for your convenience. Click on it to see it in all its glory. Does that blow your mind or what?

Essence of the Common Man

The boys and I stopped at a local Indigo (Chapters) on the way back from our favourite local Vietnamese / Thai fusion restaurant (Pho Thi Fusion) and while I was shopping for photography books, they were buying art. Jon picked up the latest Ondaatje and Nick grabbed a couple of classics to read when this term ends.

I walked up to them standing in front of the poetry session and Nick remarked that he loved Haiku. We chatted about that for a moment, and I began pondering a little ditty that was based on our love for crude humour. The kind you'd find in some Kevin Smith movies. The trickiest part is getting the three lines to match the correct syllable count -- 5-7-5.

I came up with this final version after refining it a few times ...

flatulent odor
perfume of the common man
he loves his own brand

Yes, I am very proud of it :-)