High Plains Drifter

I have posted an album of 7 images from the total lunar eclipse on my gallery.  Here is the direct link.  I shot exclusively at telephoto length (400mm) with my 80-400mm Nikon lens. The images I processed were roughly 250 to 320 ISO images. I hate high ISO noise, so I rarely shoot above ISO 400 unless I absolutely have to. The problem is that at such low ISO is ya gotta leave the shutter open with such low light… and with 400mm of length and f/5.6 (sloow!)…its extremely difficult to achieve sharp images… but I did the best I could, and I am satisfied with my results. On the tripod, I used a remote shutter cable with my D200 with VR mode off and mirror lock UP… I was fortunate that the wind was almost calm at that time of morning. Still though, I found it just about impossible to get sharp images at longer than 1 second shutter speed at 400mm of length during the darker stages of the eclipse. By increasing the exposure compensation and curves adjustment, more noise was introduced even at ISO 250, but wasn’t as bad as my ISO 600 shots, so I didn’t even bother to fully process those.