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The venue was the foreshore in Rockingham and the organisers of the viewing party were The Rockingham Camera Club, with Camera Electronic and C. R Kennedy sending representatives and sample lenses to help out. I initially thought that Saul had organised the eclipse of the moon, but apparently it was already on the cards...
The spot has a rather unique view - you get to look back from the curve of the bay to see the moon rise over the coastline but reflected in the water. It was rather reminiscent of Ansel Adams' famous " Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico " but instead of a romantic adobe church and graveyard, Kwinana offers a fertilizer works. Perhaps romance, like fertilizer, is in the eye of the beholder.
In any case some 38 people arranged to use this stretch of the beach as vantage for the moonrise and the later eclipse, with the strong lighting of the industrial area as counterpoint to the dimming of the satellite. There were long lenses of every description in use for the view - the well-known foreshortening and compression effects must have led to some very spectacular images as the moon rose through the industrial haze.
I was particularly impressed with a 400mm zoom lens attached to one of the newest Panasonic mirror-less cameras that Sam Perejuan was using - the effect of the micro 4/3 sensor size rendering the view some 600mm in 35mm film terms meant quite a large orb in the viewfinder, but the really impressive part was the efficiency of the image stabilisation mechanism in the Panasonic. Sam wasn't on a tripod, but his shots were so clear as to show the heat haze around the image.
It's not a fast thing, a moonrise, but fast enough that the participants made sure that they were set up and pointed precisely, well before the predicted time. This particular evening had a moon that appeared larger in the sky than at other times, though it was still a small object if you were using a standard lens. The other thing about this sort of thing was the absolute predictability about the timing - you might not have been able to do much about clouds or rain, but if they were not there to obscure things, you could count on the moon. The timing seemed to be to the minute.
The later phase - the eclipse itself, was a slow business too, but at least that gave the keen ones a good chance to get shots of the intense redness during the height of the event. I heard one person ask another if this was one of the eclipses that you could watch with the naked eye - and of course it is. The fact that the path of observation was shared with bright city lights and industrial illumination, however, meant that we might not have been seeing it at it's best - that may have been reserved for watchers in deep bush areas. I'm satisfied, however, as I actually saw something - unlike the year that Halley's Comet supposedly came by. That year I spent hours out in the back yard trying to imagine that I was seeing it, but in the end I concluded it was something that had been cooked up by a comedy team on the ABC.
Well, the evening would have been fine even if the moon had not come up. The Rockingham Camera Club knows how to entertain, and that means how to feed the visitors. Fish and chips and then really good home-made desserts. It could not have been more delightful. If they ever offer you a dinner invitation any time...accept.
