Harvest moon meetup

Some of you know my buddy Neil Zeller, the famous Calgary photographer. I actually knew him from before his photography career, when he was the famous Calgary barefoot runner. Every year about this time he does a photowalk. The idea is to show up with your camera, stroll around cameraing, and chat with other people interested in photography. There are about 70 people in the group photo Neil took.

I've been to several of these now, and they're lots of fun. This year I ran into several people I already knew in person, a few that I knew on social media, and a few people new to me. I got several nice compliments on this blog, thank you very much.

Normally I'm out shooting by myself, waiting for the light to be the way I hope for it to be, or strolling along however seems good to me. I can set up where I want to be, subject to safety and consideration of other people that are using that area. Every now and then I've been out with other individuals or small groups, and that's fun too. It's interesting to see what other people shoot and how they go about it. It's quite the change to be around so many people holding cameras all at once.

If you're on Instagram you can see the other photos by using the hashtag #neilzeller. I wasn't in a moony mood, if you'll forgive the phrase. I was more interested in lights reflected on the river. Editing night shots is a little interesting because of the difference in what our eyes see, and what the camera sees. As you edit, the program often assumes you want it to look like daylight, which increases the noise and often looks terrible. But we know it's dark, and I like to edit the photos so they are somewhat dark as well. I try to replicate the colour of the sky, and bring up the reflections in the water.

Some people are playing with composite shots, where they take one photo exposed for the scene with the moon a blinding white ball, then another with the scene really dark so the moon is properly exposed. Then if you properly placate the Photoshop demons, you get an image with both the moon and the scene properly exposed. I haven't done that.

Here's some of my shots.

Courtesy of Brad from Canon Canada, I got a chance to shoot a Canon 6D Mark II. Wow! I am seriously tempted. It feels great in my hands, and once I brought Lightroom up to date, the photos look terrific.

It wasn't a late night at all, even by my standards. I was thinking about doing some more shooting afterward, but headed home. Then darned if I couldn't sleep. My mind was full of photography projects, potential macro shots, a shopping list, and all sorts of photo related stuff. It took a long time to get to sleep.