I hadn't planned to get up but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) one of my kids crawled into my bed at 4:30 waking me up.

I could see the moon right out of my window while lying in bed and I thought, darn, now I've gotta get up to get a shot :)

http://www.zooomr.com/photos/marinagarrison/3066138/

Marina - Very cool, I missed it coming out of eclipse due to fog. Glad to see someone got a good shot. You should thank your kid.

@Thomas Hawk, me thinks too much wine, or maybe, you had something else in your system. Cause your little psychedelic morning experience must have been induced.

You OK?

@Masteriamnot. Will do. Didn't much feel like it at the time though ;) Seriously, has anyone actually tried putting up a tripod in the dark while half asleep...?

Here's mine:

Here's mine:

Well first I need to ask for forgiveness on my lack on not getting involved within our Zooomr groups… I’m SOOOORY!! There is so much here at Zooomr and I’m missing it!!! Ahhh, huge burden off my shoulders.. time for complete involvement!!

Trevor Carpenter and I had a phone call about where we were going to shoot, I told him that I hope I’d wake up and he said that his little girl is getting up with him at 2:00am. That was all I needed to hear – I’m not about to hear from Trevor about how I missed it and even his daughter got pictures.

OK, so– my night prior to the eclipse was filled with unpacking from the San Francisco trip and trying to figure out what to do for my daughter Alexis’s birthday - 9/25/95 (shameless plug for my girl)..

I knew I would be way to tired (if I even woke up) to set up the tripod and focus my camera (by the way – Manual focusing at 3am in the morning is almost impossible for me). The smartest thing I did that night was to get everything set up:
1. Tripod angled around the area where the moon would be
2. 300mm lens set to infinite focus and taped (that way I wouldn’t move the focus)
(Wishing I had a 600mm prime)
3. Formatted Card and fresh battery.
4. Remote shutter cord attached and functioning properly
5. All nicely covered with a beach towel.
6. An alarm clock that actually works.

With all this set up I knew I only needed to wakeup and point to the moon and start shooting.

I woke up (to my amazement) and started shooting a white crescent moon at ISO 100 (I always start at 100 and then move up if blurring starts occurring due to moon and star movement (really don’t like going over 400 - but I did this night).

When I shoot at night I like to set the camera in “M” Mode – this allows me to adjust aperture and shutter on the fly – depending on what results I’m getting (I normally shoot everything in “A” Aperture priority 70 – 80% of the time)

Once you’re satisfied with your ISO speed, try to use your remote shutter switch like a paintbrush, continually trying different effects with varying lengths of shutter and Aperture speeds. This worked great when the moon was going into full eclipse – I was able to adjust on the fly.

Lastly – Shoot in RAW…. This allows you to totally adjust white balance and many other camera settings that may not be quite right and you can edit these when you are post processing.

On these moon shots I didn’t want to overly process the pictures (although the urge to make the moon super red was there).. I finally went to bed about 4am and woke up 2 hours later for work.. As Trevor put it on our phone call – “sacrifice for your art man!” OK Man, I did!

Hope you enjoyed my recap and a hopefully my tips are useful for the next time you shoot at night. I'm always learning - especially when shooting at night.

I feel like jet lagged after shooting the eclipse. It was on and off here in Vancouver, the clouds kept on coming.

After becoming frustrated with my meager 300mm, I decided to tinker around with my kit lens.

This one was shot at 1600 ISO, 18mm, f/3.5, 15 second exposure -- then lots of tweaking in LightRoom and a run through Noise Ninja.

Once you’re satisfied with your ISO speed, try to use your remote shutter switch like a paintbrush, continually trying different effects with varying lengths of shutter and Aperture speeds. This worked great when the moon was going into full eclipse – I was able to adjust on the fly.

Good tip Randy! I do the same thing all the time, experimenting with speeds with the shutter release.

Great recap and no wonder why you got such awesome shots of the eclipse. I only wish I had managed the waking up and shooting part better.

@Thomas Hawk, me thinks too much wine, or maybe, you had something else in your system. Cause your little psychedelic morning experience must have been induced.

Well only two glasses of wine. Nothing else except a little tiredness :)

Love seeing all the great shots in this thread.