The moon started peeking out from behind the Sandias at 8:08:32 this evening. The sun had set four minutes earlier, but the bright moon in the waning light made the exposures difficult all the same.

On my way out to the bosque tonight, I stopped to photograph an iris with my Lumix GF1 and the battery died. I ran back in a got Laurie’s Lumix FZ35, which zooms to 480mm, and headed back out to the river. It’s too bad the battery died on the GF1 because I had planned to use a 400mm lens on a tripod to photograph the moon with it tonight. The GF1 has manual settings that are easy to adjust, whereas, the FZ35 is not easy to use on manual settings.

The first photo of the moonrise is done with the FZ35 at 480mm. The photo is done hand held, but I turned off the image stabilization. I was going to put it on the tripod, but  since I rarely use that camera, I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the aperture and shutter speed on the manual settings.

The second moonrise was done using my Lumix L10 with a Leica 28mm to 100mm zoom lens. I turned off the image stabilization and hand-held the camera. I was able to expose for the moon without completely blacking out the river, bosque and mountains. The problem is everything but the moon is still underexposed, and the moon is small with the lens set at 100mm, but it is still has good detail for hand held with image stabilization turned off.

The reason I’m turning off image stabilization on my stabilized lenses is because I’m not sure it helps. I’ve always left stabilization turned on on those lenses, and should have gotten crystal clear photos, all the time, but that has not always been the case. My 40mm f1.7 lens, my macro lens, and Le Long Lens, that I rented, are not stabilized and I get very clear photos with them, even at slow shutter speeds; therefore, I’m testing turning off the image stabilization on my stabilized lenses to see how they do un-stabilized. So far so good.

I did the photo of the black ant with my macro lens. The ant looked like it was dancing or doing a touch down prance. I’m tempted to photoshop a foot ball in it’s left ant hand.