Technically it’s not a blood moon as per the accepted use of that term, since this was not taken during a lunar eclipse, but I’d say it is still appropriate in this case! BC is having a really bad year again for forest fires in the interior, and with the stationary high-pressure ridge off the coast, there have been continuous outflow winds, pushing smoke from the interior to the coast. For over a week, we’ve had gray smoky skies here in Vancouver, with strangely yellow/orange sunshine, what little sun there has been! After work one evening, the moon was a deep orange/red colour and I decided to take a shot with the Fujifilm XF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6R LM OIS WR that I currently have on loan from Fujifilm. I actually wasn’t expecting much and figured all the smoky haze would make for a blurry image, but no! The shot actually turned out to be amazingly sharp.
The photo was taken with my X-Pro2, the 100-400mm zoomed all the way to 400mm, the lens wide open at f/5.6, and a 0.4 second exposure at ISO 400 on a tripod. The moon was very dim, much dimmer than it would normally be. The shot has been cropped in a lot too, and if you click on the high-res link, I’d say it’s almost at 1:1 pixels. The raw file was converted via PhotoNinja for the best micro-contrast. The smoke has been awful, but at least I’ve gotten one nice shot because of it. I’m also impressed at how sharp the big Fujifilm zoom is wide-open at 400mm…
