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2-1-07
On February 1st, the full moon returned once again. It gets its name since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month and native tribes of the north and east most often called February's full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult. My idea was to head on out and take some long exposures of some open areas, granted most of the snow has been melted away. After heading back home and spending a few hours on my photos, I happend to look up out of the skylight and saw a pretty awesome moon ring (a.k.a. Ice Halo). This time I at least had some things to increase composition.

I have actually wanted a shot with the river and moon together for quite some time, but the problem is the moon always rises to the east of the Mississippi. Since Illinois is also east of the Miss, obviously that couldn't be done from my location. I hopped across the river to LeClaire and this time was looking back at Port Byron. One thing I have noticed with all of these pictures after I resize them is that it is leaving behind a TON of jpeg artefacts. The pictures don't look good at all. It is doing something very annoying too all the points of lights (mainly stars) and is blocking up the contrast between light/dark areas in the sky. I wish I knew a way to avoid this. I have tried a couple different programs to resize them but I still end up with the same results. It is getting extremely frustrating.




By the time I got to taking this 3rd picture, both of my hands were completely numb. I tried to switch a few settings on the camera and literally couldn't feel myself even touching it. I knew I wasn't going to be out very long so I just tried to fire as many as I could off.



This next one might just be my favorite of them all. I crippled the tripod almost all the way down and backed it out to 17mm. I like the focus on this one, especially since I hurried up the process! I was just thinking "truck, warmth".



So that was nearly all I could take of that. Now it was all up to the window mount. I really didn't feel like stepping foot back out of that vehicle. This is back at one of my favorite places to shoot. This time that drainage ditch is flooding well beyond its banks. I wanted some shots like this to show why the moon got its name. This was almost exactly like it looked.



I wanted to get one more shot from here too. I had already taken some from this exact location before, but it was my first time out with the window mount. Like an idiot I left the truck running which vibrated it way too much. I was doing fine here but almost knocked it off of its mount when a semi passing underneath honked at me. I'm not sure exactly why he did that, but it sure scared the bejesus out of me.



Here is a prime example of what I was talking about in the opening paragraph. See the blotchy section on the left hand side??? I simply cannot avoid that when I resize my images. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it's really, REALLY annoying. I had many more pictures I wanted to post in this section also but the problem was too persistant.



I saw this on the drive home. I had originally passed it up and then thought twice about it. I thought it would be a pretty cool shot with all of the trees casting shadows onto the snowy groud. I'm kind of glad I did throw it in reverse, I like the way they turned out. So, after this shot I drove the rest of the way home and started doing some work to my pictures. I thought I was done for the night.


There is a skylight right above where I sit and do my computer stuff. As I was waiting for Photoshop to boot up, I leaned back and looked up and saw an AWESOME ice halo around the moon. I sprung up out of my chair and got my stuff ready once again. It was now even quite a bit colder than it was earlier, but I really wanted to get some better shots this time. In all, I snapped 27 long exposures and that was all my hands and feet could take.







Here is another example of that problem. It took all the stars and made them almost look like hot pixels. I'll find out a way to fix that soon....I hope.





One other thing that happened tonight was the presence of a TON of noise. Even at ISO 100, the camera was picking up an insane amount of it. I always thought that in colder weather noise levels would decrease. The camera was certainly out long enough to adjust to the low temps. Thanks to Neat Image it cleaned up most of it, but it is still an annoyance that I couldn't figure out. At ISO 800 it is more understandable, but it was still taking on way too much.






I consider this a pretty successful outing even though it was frigid cold. Thanks to the window mount, I was able to avoid most of it in the warmth of the vehicle. Well, that is when the truck was running.

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Nature, the way it was intended!