Lunar Eclipse Over Mt. Shasta
Award winning Southern Oregon Photographer Sean Bagshaw's photo, Lunar Eclipse Over Mt. Shasta, is now on view at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, one of the most prestigious and highly-visited museums in the world, running from mid-November through April 2009.
Says Mr. Bagshaw about the multi-stage eclipse photo “Photographing an entire lunar eclipse can be particularly elusive. I am very grateful that I had the chance to create the image. I doubt that I will get a similar opportunity again in my lifetime.”
It has won numerous awards and has been selected as the Category Winner for the Creative Digital category in the 2008 Windland Smith Rice International Nature's Best Photography Awards. Sean's photo was selected from more than 20,000 entries and will be featured as one of the 100 winning or highly commended images in this year's competition.
According to the competition organizers the photography honored by the Nature's Best Photography Awards serves to inspire millions of people worldwide.
The award-winning photograph will be published in the 2008 Fall Awards Special Collector's Edition of Nature's Best Magazine, in mid-November.
Winning images will be posted on www.NaturesBestPhotography.com by the end of November. In addition, the NATURE'S BEST PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS will be displayed in galleries on AOL Pixcetera and MSNBC.
Sean Bagshaw is an accomplished landscape photographer capturing nature photographs in a way that few photographers can consistently maintain at the level that Sean does. For more on Sean’s take on the award winning Lunar Eclipse photo and other amazing prints please visit the Outdoor Exposure Photography site. The Lunar Eclipse photo can be seen at http://www.outdoorexposurephoto.com/
Sean Bagshaw’s comments on the “Lunar Eclipse Over Mount Shasta” photograph:
Night photography is always challenging, but photographing an entire lunar eclipse can be particularly elusive. Lunar eclipses occur when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon casting its shadow on the moon's surface. A total lunar eclipse is a relatively rare event, occurring on average about once per year. They can only occur during a full moon, when the moon and sun are on opposite sides of Earth. However, lunar eclipses don't occur during every full moon because the Earth doesn't normally pass directly between the two. Most often the Earth's shadow passes to one side of the moon or the other. On some occasions the Earth is in a position that causes only part of the moon's face to fall into its shadow creating a partial eclipse. Even with an average of one total lunar eclipse occurring each year, the chance to photograph an entire eclipse is much more rare. An eclipse is only visible from the side of the Earth that is facing the moon when it occurs. If you happen to be on the wrong side you miss the entire thing. There is a very small chance that an entire eclipse will be visible from where you happen to be on the planet. More often, if you happen to be in the right place to view an eclipse it will have already begun when the moon rises or will still be in progress when the moon sets, making photographing the entire event impossible. Another obstacle to photographing an entire eclipse is clouds. Even a single cloud passing in front of the moon for several minutes would eliminate the chance of capturing an image of every phase.
During the night and early morning of August 28, 2007 a spectacular total lunar eclipse was going to be visible from start to finish from the west coast of North America, provided that there were clear skies. A friend and I decided to try our luck photographing the event from a point high in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon. Arriving at our location before midnight we spent the next six hours under cloudless skies photographing the progression of the Earth's shadow as it crossed the face of the moon. My plan was to create a single multiple exposure image showing all the phases of the moon as it passed through the Earth's shadow. However, my digital camera doesn't have the ability to capture multiple exposures in a single image file. Out of necessity, I would need to take separate images of the moon and recreate the scene as a composite of many frames. This turned out to be a benefit because it allowed me to zoom in with a telephoto lens and track the moon as it moved across the sky, capturing it in great detail. Had I been taking a single multiple exposure image I would have needed to use a wide angle lens to keep the moon in the frame for six hours without moving the camera. As a result the moon would have been reduced to a small point of light, too small to see much detail of the eclipse.
At the end of the event I had taken a couple hundred close up images of the moon with my telephoto lens. Right as the predawn light began to appear on the horizon I took a wider landscape photo knowing that I would later place various moon images in an arc across the sky. Without any sleep I spent most of the next day selecting 20 frames that best illustrated the progression of the eclipse and carefully arranged them in an arc on my background. The resulting image tells a six-hour story of a cosmic event in a single photo illustration. I am very grateful that I had the chance to create the image. I doubt that I will get a similar opportunity again in my lifetime.
Canon EOS 5D; Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L lens and EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens; exposure times and apertures varied accordingly with the changing brightness of the moon.
See more incredible images at http://www.outdoorexposurephoto.com
Photo:
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