Moon shots

On January 10th, there was a bright moon and a clear sky, so in spite of the fact I had been battling the flu, I was excited to make my first attempt at moon photography.  Side note: getting the actual flu, and not just a virus with similar symptoms, is pretty dang annoying.  I am STILL feeling effects from it and it's been only a few days short of a month.

I don't have a telephoto lens.  Heck, I only have the kit (18-55) lens for my Nikon D3300.  But Marie has a 55-300mm lens that, using a tripod, gets enough definition to allow for a pleasing finished product if you crop the image.  Here are a couple that came out fairly well, plus a composite of some other shots to make a sort of "moon trail."  What I found was that, using this equipment anyway, autofocus got a much crisper result than manual.  The first two below were on auto, and of course using a remote.  The trail was set up with manual focus, and then I waited 2 minutes between remote triggers.  It was fun to track the moon in the sky but you can see how much less definition there is to the surfaces in that one.

New Year's Day at Shaker Village

We spent the holiday at one of our favorite places - Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.  We already knew how beautiful the buildings and grounds were, but we didn't know about all the great trails on the nature preserve area of their property.  We hiked the Chinquapin trail, then a connector to the Shawnee Run Trail, which led us to an amazing waterfall.  Below are some pictures of some of the grounds and the trails we hiked, plus a beautiful sunset at the end of the day.  These were taken with a Nikon D3200 and a Nikon P310, and are unedited.  Click to see the larger versions.  Hope you enjoy!