Wednesday, March 15, 2017

I like night. Night shooting.

Well what do you do when you have to work the 'graveyard' shifts or get off at odd times of the morning and there is a clear sky and bright moonlight....

you almost can't pass up the chance to experiment a bit with night shooting in the moonlight.

The biggest issue is that even in bright moonlight your auto focus cannot pick up anything. I solved this when I had my friend stand and I could shine a light and focus on her. Without another person, it is a bit harder.

For this shot I turned on the vehicle headlights, got a focus and pressed the shutter with a 12 second delay. I ran back to the car and flipped off the lights.

Bravo! I got a 60 second shot!

Then I thought the moonlit road would be interesting.
And...it really wasn't interesting other than only being lit by moonlight.

And then a 'shot' in the dark. I used to moon to get a focus and then pointed the camera an tripod behind the car.
At least there are stars in this one and the colors are more interesting.
The picture is noisy and has some funky pixels in it.
I was too cold to continue at this point, the temperature was 10 degrees.

So I packed up and went home to bed.

Since I had to work another midnight shift, I thought I'd take a few moments on my way to work to try out some other night shots.

I went to the pedestrian crossing near the Genoa

This shot was a total mistake. I didn't use the timer to prevent a jiggle in the exposure and the plant lights were too bright.
But one has to make mistakes in order to improve.

6 seconds of exposure at f 4.5 was too much. I should have gone to an f 11 perhaps.
I didn't have time to really take other shots, I had to be at the plant in 10 minutes after taking this shot.

However I pointed the camera with the same settings in the other direction towards the dam and got this shot. The color version was a mixed back of odd colors from the bright lights at the dam and the different kinds of light they have, so I turned it into a Black and White shot.

This turned out much better.

It was cold and I had little time to experiment, so I wrapped things up and went to work.

On my way home I couldn't help but pull over and take a shot in Romance, WI. The Bad Axe river was steaming and the trees were full of frost.
I pulled onto a side road and walked through the ditch to try and get a decent shot.


The light was so glaring and different from Night shooting.
But it was worth the walk through the crunchy snow.

Tonight the 15th will probably be my last night for any moonlit shots for this month. I can look forward to this again in April.

Perhaps I can convince my night hiking pal to help me go out tonight and take some of the snow lit up by the moon.
We will see!

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