Feel free to use these for whatever you will. I haven’t cropped them for common desktop resolutions this time, I will leave that to you.

These are full 8 megapixel jpg’s with some light processing done. Thumbnails and links after the jump.

West Texas Pano by
Alex Morse is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Photos will appear here in the next hour for the 2008 lunar eclipse visible from North America. Got some good pictures from my home near Dallas, TX. It’s cloudy, but the clouds are moving fast so don’t pose a huge problem!

And here we are with some pictures!

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To take these pictures I used my trusty old Canon 20D with the 70-200mm f2.8 IS lens. I also used a very crappy tripod. In this situation neither the IS nor the tripod helped me much. The first few pictures before the shadow is dominating the moon I took at an Aperture of f14 and a shutter of about 1/250 second. You can see these are much sharper than the latter pictures.

Since the 20D doesn’t have a spot meter I had to experiment a bit to find the exposure I wanted. Using center weighted or whole scene metering throws things FAR too overexposed for the moon. When shooting the moon you have to remember that the moon is very very bright compared to it’s surroundings. Even using exposure compensation, 2 stops underexposed according to the meter is no where near enough. I think at 1/250 @ f14 the meter thinks I was 6-10 stops underexposed. If I had a spot meter, I probably could have metered on the moon, and dialed it in with EC.

The latter pictures where the shadow dominates my shutter crept down to 1/30 – 1/2 second. These are not as sharp. I tried using IS on mode 2, full IS, sacrificing aperture to bring the shutter up higher and I just couldn’t get as sharp a shot. Time for me to get a real tripod.

I didn’t take the time to do all the touchups and tweaks I normally would for a print, that is up to you. You are free to use this however you want, even commercially. All I ask is a credit and link for the original source.

Additionally here are a couple crops to use as wallpaper if you fancy the scenery.

West Texas Pano by
Alex Morse is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Apologies for the quality. My longest lens at the moment is just 200mm, so this is heavily cropped.

To be fair, it’s a stinking pile of poo because my Mac only has one processor and it’s not the beefiest of processors to boot. It also doesn’t have a great graphics card. Even so, Aperture is really a lot of poo.

I installed the trial because I need a DAM solution, and I’d heard good things about Aperture’s management of offline files. To be a bit more explicit I have tens of thousands of large photo files. I don’t keep them on my hard drive, I back them up to DVD. Now when I want to go back and get at some of those photos, I need to know where they are. The discs are labeled with date ranges, but that doesn’t help much. I don’t have a photographic memory. So what I need is a piece of software that can store small versions of all my photos so I can browse through, find the disc they’re on, put it in, and pull them up.

It doesn’t really sound like much to ask. Well, apparently it is.

There’s a number of software packages that do this; at least they claim to do this. Apple’s iPhoto would actually be a better solution for me, because I don’t need any more photo editing tools. I tried iPhoto, the new version supports offline files similar to the way I want, but it has some bugs and acts clunky so it can’t do the job I need.

I bought some software last year specifically for this task, it was called Qpict. Seemed like a saviour, but it was just a tease. It actually has exactly the features I want, but silly me, I updated to the latest version and it broke. I can no longer look at my library. This is of course after I had indexed and tagged 22 some odd dvds, no small amount of time. Qpict support has yet to solve my problem, actually they don’t even respond to my emails. The software would be really great, if it worked, or if it was supported.

But back to Aperture. I downloaded the trial, imported my dvds (which took forever,) and now I’m trying to browse the library. It chokes. It hasn’t even made thumbnails of everything yet. Qpict did this in a matter of minutes (per dvd), iPhoto as well. I’m not sure what the deal is here. This is almost completely unuseable. I have better than the minimum requirements, but uh… I guess those are exaggerated.

So now I’m trying something called iView, and it SEEMS perfect. It’s $120 through Amazon, so I’m considering buying it. I’m going to play with the trial a few more days and see if I can break it. These guys are a larger company so I think they’ll be able to support the product properly. They also have a user community so I’m likely to be able to get help there if I need it.

– Update –

The good folks at Qpict did refund me in full, as well as offer me the next version of their pro software for free. While I still have a problem with how they handled the issue initially, I understand that I was a strange exception and not a high priority. They made a nice gesture as apology so there’s no hard feelings. Their new software looks like a great solution for me and many others.