Distracted by the Moon

I was invited to a charity event this past weekend that had me going to a professional Football game here in Calgary. My father happened to be in town and suggested I take his Canon EF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS USM lens. I took him up on the offer as I wanted to try it out and see how well it would perform. This was an evening game starting at 7:30pm and at this time of year the sun sets by 7pm, so I didn’t know what to expect for lighting. As this was just a fun outing I wasn’t worried about taking an unfamiliar lens and giving it a whirl. The lens turned out to be a lot of fun at the game, more from a useful tool to see the action up close than to really get any decent shots like you see in Sport Illustrated. The seats were almost as far back as you can get from the action. I ended up having to crank up the ISO in order to capture any of the game and I’m not a football fan by any means thus soon I was distracted by things other than the game. And then the moon appeared from behind the stadium stands across the field. I had not taken tripod or monopod (don’t have a monopod anyway), so I was hand holding all my shots, but figured I should be able to get a few not too bad frames of the moon. I was shooting away trying different settings and testing the image stabilization when I saw what I thought might have been an airplane heading towards the moon. Ah, a better distraction. So I started to capture the moment thinking I might see a small streak appear in front of the moon. To my surprise (I even missed a frame I was so startled) it was a helicopter and it was closer (bigger) than I expected. Here are the four frames that I captured during my deviation from the game.

P.S. Calgary lost.

1/8000 sec at f5.6, ISO 1600, 400mm, cropped