Hands-On Photography Episode 124 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Ant Pruitt (00:00):
Today on Hands-On Photography. I challenged you. You stepped up for the challenge. Yep. We're talking about the moon photography challenge. You guys sent in a bunch of different images. I'm only gonna show you a hand full of them. So y'all stay tuned. Let's check out these shots,
... (00:16):
This TWiT.
Leo Laporte (00:18):
Listeners of this program. Get it, that free version. If they're members of club TWiT $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club, TWiT discord, a great clubhouse for TWiT listeners and finally the TWiT plus feed with shows like Stacy's book club, the untitled Lenox show, the GIZ Fiz, and more go to TWiT.tv/club TWiT. And thanks for your support.
Ant Pruitt (00:51):
Hey, what's going on folks I am at, and this is Hands-On Photography here on TWiT TV. Hope y'all doing well. I'm unbelievable as always. This is show where I like to sit down and share different tips and tricks that are gonna help make you a better photographer and a better post processor. And from time to time, I actually challenge you too. I wanna challenge you to be the better photographer and post processor and that's what's going on with this week's show. But before we get into all of that stuff, let me do my standard preamble and welcome all of you to the show. Hands-On Photography, those of you that are here for the very first time, I appreciate you popping in. Go ahead and subscribe right now in whatever podcast application you're using, we're available on all of them and whether it's apple podcast or the Spotify, whether it's YouTube or Google all of those things, you know, so go ahead and subscribe on those and be sure to check out our website as well, because it has all of the previous episodes and previous show notes.
Ant Pruitt (01:56):
Yes. I have show notes for this show. Get that go to TWiT.tv/hop that TWiTt TV slash H O P for Hands-On Photography. And you can see all of the subscription options there and all of the show notes and stuff, just like I previously mentioned now, all that stuff sided the way let's go ahead and get started with this week's episode. Y'all okay. So way back on, I think it was episode one 16, see sold 1 16, 1 17, somewhere in that area, we did a sunrise photography challenge where I took a look at some images from, from a proposed sunrise photography challenge. Okay. So then I said, all right, your next challenge, if you choose to accept is moon photography. And I gave you some time to go ahead and get out and shoot, not get out there and share, and share with me images that you shot last year that you shot, you know, umpteen years ago or several months ago.
Ant Pruitt (02:57):
I wanted you to get up off your butts and go outside and take some photographs of the moon with whatever camera you had. Didn't matter if it was a smartphone, didn't matter if it was a fancy fancy me or DSLR, or even a point and shoot, just get on out there and go shoot moon photography. That was a task at hand. And quite a few you of you followed that to the T some of you did not though, some of you didn't, but that's okay. Yeah. I asked you to email the images to me at hop TV, and I got a bunch of 'em in, and some of those images that came through, they were quite nice, but I'm not going to go over some of those images on this week's episode. Why? Because number one, they came from, I don't know, several months ago they came from several years ago, the images.
Ant Pruitt (03:48):
So I automatically dismissed those. Those are disqualified. I needed this challenge to be an active challenge. Okay. And then there was the aspect of folks that were sending in the images that I thought were absolutely beautiful, but they did not give me their written consent in the email that said, Hey, you can show my images on the show. I'm cool with you showing my images for, for Hands-On Photography and for the Hands-On Photography community. So I had to just leave those out the way too, but I still have some nice ones to pick here that I thought would be great for discussing. And so let's go ahead and do that now, but first let's pause for just a quick break while I get good old light room squared away and load it up, you know, cuz I don't want y'all to see this thing taken forever to load.
Ant Pruitt (04:34):
So let's take a quick break and then we'll take a look at some of these images and okay. So I got an image in, and this, this came with the email and it came from D Simmons and the message reads as I was out in my yard a few days ago. And notice the moon was visible in early afternoon here in Atlanta, huh? Southern man. Now I had just purchased a used 70 to 200 millimeter L lens for my cannon and just wanted to see what kind of reach I could get with the moonshot. If I was going to try one of these for your challenge one night. So I shot the first shot just for the size reference then I thought, Hmm, let me put the tree in the frame just to give it a, a, give it more perspective. Then the artistic juices started flowing.
Ant Pruitt (05:20):
And as I, as you say the yourself, oh, okay. Okay. One last shot. Yep. Been there, done that. Now back to Rakin leaves says Mr. Simmons, most people, myself included think of moonshot as only at night, but a quote day moon is a viable option. Couldn't agree more next time. I'll be ready to really get creative. Love your show. Free to use anything here for a teachable moment. If you see fit and that's from the sentence. All right. Yeah. Great image. So let me go ahead and pull it up here inside of light room for you. All right. So he mentioned shooting actually a couple different things of a note here. He's on a a, a big body camera mirrorless or DSLR. One of those, I'm assuming it's a DSLR. I don't see it here in my metadata, but he mentioned shooting a 70 to 200 millimeter lens and okay.
Ant Pruitt (06:23):
That is one of my favorite lenses. I don't know if it's necessarily ideal for moon photography, but it depends on what you're trying to do. So with this shot here, he's got a nice zoom going and on and he can clearly see the moon. But if you want like some extra detail, like detail like this to show up in the, in the frame to fill up the frame, you're gonna need more reach. But with that said, I love the idea of shooting in the daytime to capture the moon because at least for me here in Sonoma county, California, it's really tough for me to see the moon some days it's some evenings. I, I don't know why you science folks probably know why I have no idea. I there's. A lot of times I just don't get to see the moon at night.
Ant Pruitt (07:09):
The sky's either way too cloudy or the moon is like way far away for some reason. But in the daytime, I see it out there quite frequently and shooting the moon in the daytime brings a different host of challenges because you're dealing with the light coming from the sun, all of the ambient lighting, and then you're dealing with the reflective light coming off of the moon. And when you look back at our episode, I believe it was episode 1 0 6, where we talked about how to shoot the moon, the challenges of just dealing with the reflective light coming off the moon is enough of a headache. Let alone dealing with ambient lighting of the daytime. So I gotta give you credit for being able to knock this shot out and not have it all over exposed or underexposed, and still be able to capture detail in your foreground here as well is getting a little bit of detail of the moon showing up there off in the distance, good stuff.
Ant Pruitt (08:04):
And the framing on it. I like that you got the creative juices going and saying, Hey, let me frame up this shot. Let me not just shoot the moon in this plain old blue sky. Let me see if I can capture it as it's just going right past this tree, them here on the screen and right underneath these extra little branches and leaves and TWiTgs and stuff, not TWiTgs, but you know, limbs right there on the other side of the tree, nicely done way to stay patient way to put the thinking cap on and think about composition and framing. Totally dig this shot nicely done. I wish I knew which this was, but doesn't really matter. It's on a 70 to 200 millimeter lens. So it's probably like a can 65 D or maybe one of their Canon R series. Not sure. So good one.
Ant Pruitt (08:55):
And you got another one in here? Pretty much the same premise. I don't like the framing on this one as much, but I do dig this clarity again on this image here. Okay. So first thing that I was thinking, there's a lot of just dead space showing up on this screen. So why not just get rid of that dead? So I wanna crop it down. You know what? I will make it an unrestrained crop. So why not just crop it down and get rid of all of that extra space on the left, all of that blue on the left. Cause it doesn't really add to the image, but that right there, in my opinion, I think that works. We get a nice little framing of the moon up in the upper third of the image. So again, very, very nice work on this one. I love your thought process and your, your ability to just say, you know what, let me challenge myself and shoot this as a, as a moonshot in the daytime.
Ant Pruitt (09:51):
So good stuff. Now let's go back and take a look at our, our next bit of feedback. This one comes from J wise, this is hello. An Hands-On Photography is an incredible show. All right, now you watch it. You just gonna make me blush here. I have learned a lot. Please continue to share content earlier. I sent the moon photo from my phone. I finally had an opportunity to capture the moon after leaving my job. Please share your thoughts. You do have permission to use them on the show and that comes from J wise. Yeah. So I got your images and I, I wanna, yeah, I saw the first email, but I'm not gonna share those. I wanna share the, the images in this that you attached cuz I thought they were quite frankly, I think these are more captivating versus the first ones you sent because a lot of times when you go out there and try to shoot the moon with your cell phone, if you literally just frame it up and tap the shutter, it's a bit of an underwhelming shot.
Ant Pruitt (10:54):
If you're trying to make the moon, your focal point point of the image. And a lot of times people are saying, Hey, I'm gonna go outside and take moon photos with my phone and it's not really grabbing the moon. It's just a.off in the distance, up in the heavens. And it makes it seem like everything else in the frame is the subject. But I thought these shots that you you sent in were still quite interesting. So let me go ahead and pop on over to those doki. So here it is, huh? Moon in the daytime. Imagine that I dig that you were thinking the same thing that the previous listener was, was talking. Why not go ahead and just shoot the moon in the daytime and this one, I'm not sure the camera off hand, let me see if it shows the camera B bump bun.
Ant Pruitt (11:46):
Don't see it showing in me data, but that's okay. He just says it was shot on the camera and not a phone. And I can tell because it's got decent clarity looks like it is cropped down to a smaller resolution, but again, why not just, you know, get rid of the, the dead space over here. It's not really adding to that image. You can even do a bullseye like so putting the moon moon fairly centered or you can go even tighter, get closer to that portrait mode or closer to that eight by 10 mode and put it right here on the middle, third off to the right, like, so, and you get a much nicer and more compelling image. Heck I could, I could still crop this some more. I's doing like that. Cuz that the, the tops not really adding anything. So why give it all that extra information that right there, my friend, I think that's a much more compelling quote, moon photograph.
Ant Pruitt (12:51):
Why? Because the moon is the focal point here. I like what you did with your adjustments here. It's not over exposed. It's not underexposed. We got plenty of detail on the subject that needs to be in detail. And the tree is just a bit of an accent trying to lead your eye up towards the moon. I dig this very, very nicely done and I love how you label that moon at sunset here on the file. That's good stuff. Thank you for sending this one in. So now let me take one more pause and then we'll take a look at a couple more images here. All right. So hold on. Okay. And we're back and we got another image that comes in and we have some feedback from, I believe it's Mr. Larry Martinez. This message reads as high end. It takes some experimentation, but with the tripod and a remote shut release via iPhone, it works.
Ant Pruitt (13:48):
Ooh. I love that. Okay. Okay. To reproduce. Thanks for the great show, Larry, and this was shot then cannon power shot S six 70 HS, which is a point and shoot camera. So let's go ahead and take a look at this one. Y'all Ooh, man. Shot it at night. Got the exposure just, mm, quite nice. The detail is, is almost like really, really crispy, but this, oh, I can just, I add a little more clarity to it if I want right here inside the light room and just bring out more detail, add a little more texture and look at that. This is great. And if anything else I would do with this, I would pull down the highlights on it. Just the touch. Cuz as I pull down the highlights, I can see even more detail hide in right in the center of the moon here.
Ant Pruitt (14:40):
This is good stuff. And you shot this with, with the phone mounted on a, Tripo not phone with the camera mounted on a tripod and you use a remote trigger action. That's very, very smart pretty common technique. Cuz a lot of times people will use the remote trigger. If the camera has to be set somewhere that they can't necessarily frame it up to their face or anything like that or get behind it or they do it to minimize camera shake. You know, cuz a lot of times when you're pressing that shutter button, you still introduce just enough shake on the, on the camera that may lead to just a little bit of motion blur in your image. But if you have it on a tripod and you use a remote shutter, you're pretty much guaranteeing yourself not to get any type of micro jitters that is if you're try, APO is halfway decent, cuz a really, really cheap tripod will still have a little bit of wobble to it when the camera moves. So I don't think you had that issue here. I think this is very, very well done. Nice detailed there. If you wanna crop it in some more you could yeah I would crop it in just, you know, maybe 20% or so. Something like that,
Ant Pruitt (15:58):
Something like that. Yeah. I think that's even better. So Mr. Martinez nicely, nicely done. All right. Last image here. Let's pull up the message from our last person. Okay. This one comes from Joe Esposito. Joe Esposito is one of our club, TWiT members. I appreciate you, Joe. You good people and thank you for supporting us here in club TWiT. All right. So the message says hello, Mr. Pruitt, heres some morning shots from the morning of this, of this email. I know you set the image submission limit to one or two and I've attached four for you to select from them. Of course you did on the three vertical ones. They all have aspects that I like. So I will turn editorial control over to you. Okay. I get that even without a good zoom lens. Sorry. I was surprised much. I like these manual settings are really where the magic lives.
Ant Pruitt (16:58):
The only edited image is the one labeled op P four, which I change by pulling the color off of the moon. You have permission to use any or all of these for hop. I appreciate the show and all your great tips, Joe S Pasito. So, okay. He shot this with an O P four. Is that what that means? O P four, as in like one of those old oppo phones. So let's pull up his image here inside of Lightroom, but I didn't pull up four. I pulled up image number one. Okay. Image one, because it really got my attention with the way it's framed up and the detail and the exposure. Let me see what's the metadata on this one. Yep. No metadata listed on it. Either. Wonder why that is. Normally I get to see what everybody shot their stuff in Lightroom did just update today.
Ant Pruitt (17:50):
So maybe something's broken. I'm not sure, but anyway, we're gonna power through. So this is a shot that I grabbed out of the bunch of four, cuz I, I, it, it just got my attention. It has a pretty classic setup here. You know, when it, when you think about shooting with a fun, okay. Again, I, I mentioned people say, I'm gonna go out and shoot the moon with my phone. And it ends up being just this scene and then a little blob floating out there in the air. This is not that this, this I can tell this is a shot with the phone or something with a small sensor because of the focal length and, and the exposure on it. But yet he's still able to get a decent amount of detail off of the moon and not have it show up just as a little blob of light there in the middle of the sky.
Ant Pruitt (18:39):
So back in, I believe it was episodes 1 0 6. Again, I had talked about how you can use your phone and just play around with the, the slider and adjustment controls right there in the original camera app for your phone to help control the ISO to help control the shutter speed. So you can fight off the glare and fight off the noise and things like that when shooting these low light shots, this is great. And again, the framing, the framing on this, he has that you classic V framing going on here. If you look at the bottom of the screen and the bottom, right. Third, where the trees are and they just sort of open up into this V formation and halfway up the V formation, you get the moon, just sit in there saying, Hey, look at me. And then if you continue to follow up, you get to see rest of the trees near the top of the frame on it.
Ant Pruitt (19:32):
But they're just sort of barely there, but I just love the way this is framed up. I love the way he handled the exposure on this from a post process and standpoint, I'm definitely gonna play with this one because I wanted to have a little bit more vibrance and color to it. So we're gonna add that and a little more set here and let me pull the, the exposure back just to attach, just to see what happens. Yeah. See, even during that, I still get a fascinating nighttime shot just by pulling that exposure back. And it's nice that this, this image has enough data to allow me to play around with this even more. If I wanted to change the color of temperature of it, I could do that. So let's see if I cool it off even more watch what happens to the blue, see how that blue just got even more rich, good stuff.
Ant Pruitt (20:25):
Good stuff says we're clipping in the shadow data. So I'm gonna push the shadows up just a little, but not too much. There we go. And again, you can continue to add texture and clarity and sharpness. And if you want to do a little touch of noise reduction on it, you can, it doesn't look like it need that much though. Okay. So I just did a little bit. Yeah, this is good. Very, very good. And Hey Joe, I'm assuming you watched that episode because this, or you just knew what you were doing either way kudos to you in much respect. Thank you so much for sharing this image. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's gonna do it for this week's episode folks. This one is I'm really, really impressed that the images that I received and heck you didn't even see all of them. I got some really good images and they were quite nice.
Ant Pruitt (21:20):
Thank you again for everyone that submitted for the moon photography challenge. I need to think of another challenge for you. Also stay tuned for that, but Hey, while we're still talking about the moon word on the street is there's a lunar eclipse coming up in may. So go ahead and check that out. Look up the lunar eclipse coming up in may here 2022 and get your cameras ready for that. Again, reference episode 1 0 6 here on the show. And I'll walk you through just, you know, making sure that you can get the most outta your camera, trying to capture images of the moon. You got options like checking out my folks@lensrentals.com because they have lenses that you can rent at a Herve nice price. That's gonna allow you to get even more reach with your camera. So you can re it'll zoom in on that moon and be able to just fill up the frame with with a big old moon shot.
Ant Pruitt (22:15):
So check them out. Lens reynolds.com. I appreciate them. He helping me out in previous episodes here on hands off photography. All right. So again, if you got questions, comments, feedback, go ahead and shoot. Email hop, TWiT.tv again, it's hop TWiT.tv. I love hearing from y'all. Thank you for all of the previous messages. I answer them all eventually, but yeah, just keep sending them in and I will get back with you back to you as soon as I can. Thank you to my man, Mr. Victor, for continuing to make me look and sound good each and every week with this editing flow that you got my man, boy, I tell you, I, I, I make it work. I know I do. Hey folks, thank you again for giving me a follow over on the social medias. Giving me a follow over on Instagram. Yes. Since we're talking photography, follow, follow me on Instagram.
Ant Pruitt (23:08):
I am an underscore per over there. I love hearing from you over there and I love you when you tag me in your images, cuz y'all take some really, really cool photos and I enjoy just the back and forth interaction with all of you over there. All right. Again, thanks for the support. Make sure you do all of the like share subscribe stuff and the raid and stuff on apple pie podcast and YouTube to help push us up into ratings. All of that means a lot and until next time y'all safely create and dominate and not catch y'all next week. Take care.
Rod Pyle (23:43):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor of ad Astra magazine and each week I'm joined by Tariq Malik the editor in chief over at Space.com in our new this in space podcast. Every Friday, Tariq and I take a deep dive into the stories that define the new space age what's NASA up to when will Americans, once again set foot on the moon. And how about those samples from the perseverance Rover? When are those coming home? What the heck has Elon must done now, in addition to all the latest and greatest and space exploration, we'll take an occasional look at bits of space flight history that you probably never heard of and all with an eye towards having a good time along the way. Check us out on your favorite podcast. Catcher.
