Week 37, Day 264, January 13, 2010, Are the Stars Out Tonight?

I have a new toy.  It's a 2x extend for my 70-200mm lens.  My understanding is that it basically extends the lens to a 140-400mm lens. 

I received the 2x extender as a Christmas gift, and I have wanted to take some photographs of the stars.  I realize that there are much better ways of doing this, but I just wanted to see how well it would work.  Unfortunately we have had very few clear nights since Christmas. 

Tonight I was attempting to take photos in the clear patches of the sky, but the clouds began to move, and in a short time it was cloudy.  I took this photo for all you astronomy buffs that have had to fight the clouds.

Happy Star Gazing.

Lessons Learned:

• My tripod works fairly well when the lens is horizontal and runs parallel with the ground, but when I attempt to take a photograph of Pleiades (7 sisters) star cluster, my lens would not stay still.  Gravity was pulling the camera downward.  I'll need to find another way to attempt this.

Photo details: Exposure time 4 sec, Aperture f/5.6 (2x extenders lowest f-stop), ISO 800, Focal Length 140 mm, Lens Canon 70-200mm f2.8L USM, tripod.

Week 34, Day 239, Christmas Tree Revisted

It was another unproductive night of taking photos.  I wasn't happy with any of them.  Sometimes it's just like that.

I first tried some more Tilt-Shift simulations of a room, then I moved to outdoor photographs of the house. It's 15 degrees F right now, so it's kind of cold.  I ended with some photos of our Christmas Tree through the window.  The photo is ok, but not great.  Maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow.

Lessons Learned:

• While photographing our house from outside, I really noticed the effect of having the lens being straight up and down vs tipped upward toward the second floor.  The effects were interesting, and each could be used in different ways.  I have read about this in the past, but just really began to notice it this evening.

Photo details: Exposure time 2 sec, Aperture f/8.0, ISO 400, Focal Length 38 mm, Lens Canon EF 17-40mm, tripod.

Week 33, Day 238, December 17, 2009, "Community Carols"

There are some neat things going on in our Village.  It seems that they are beginning to do more and more as a community.

Tonight in 5 degree F weather many members of the community gathered together to sing Christmas Carols around the Christmas Tree.  It was cold, snowing, and people had smiles on their faces.  Hot chocolate and Christmas sugar cookies were passed out while the carols were sung. 

Nice going Groton! Keep up the great work.

Lessons Learned:

• Tonight's photos were completely manual settings.  The auto settings would cause the shutter speed to be to slow.  I worked hard to try and balance the photos to optimize the snow flacks, and the lighting on peoples faces.

Photo details: Exposure time 1/30 sec, Aperture f/2.8, ISO 1600, Focal Length 170 mm, Lens Canon 70-200mm f2.8L USM, handheld.

Week 32, Day 226, December 5, 2009, Groton Christmas Tree

Ever since I can remember our town has had a fake Christmas Tree on the hill above the village.  It's actually not even a tree.  It is strings of blue lights running from the top of a telephone pole to the ground.  On top of the telephone pole is speakers for the village's chimes.  These chimes/lights/tree sit on top of the hill above the village, so the tree can be seen from just about all parts of the village, and many parts of the surrounding town.

One year somebody destroyed many of the bulbs on the strings, and the village could not afford to replace them.  A decision was made not to display them that year.  Several of the local businesses and people in the town felt it was an important part of our community, and donated money to replace the lights.  I have to agree.  I've never seen anything quite like our fake tree. 

Lessons Learned:

• Holiday decorations make great photo opportunities.
• Things that are unique in an area make great photo opportunities.
• At one time, I would have thought of these lights as kind of strange.  Today they bring back a lot of good memories, and are part of a pretty special community.

Photo details: Exposure time 2.5 sec, Aperture f/5.0, ISO 100, Focal Length 155 mm, 35 mm equivalent focal length 252mm, Lens Canon 70-200mm f2.8L USM, tripod, some photo manipulation to remove the reflection of the blue lights off of some of the trees behind the tree.

Week 31, Day 224, December 3, 2009, In Case of Emergency

Tonight was the second monthly meeting of the Groton Photo Club.  We began by a discussion about night time shooting, and then proceeded to walk through the town taking photographs.  It's a great time of year because many of the Christmas decorations are up.  I think that people in town must wonder what's going on as about 15 people were walking down Main Street taking photos at 8:00 PM at night.  (Our Main Street is very small, it's about a 1/2 mile long with no traffic lights.)

As I was walking along I spotted this old fire alarm on the side of the Fire Station.  The lighting, colors, and shadows caught my eye.  I stopped and took a few photographs.  I think I might return here some day, and try some more.

Lessons Learned:

• I think that I have more of a difficult time figuring out point and shoot cameras than I do SLR.  Several people in the club had point and shoot, and I had a difficult time figuring out what the different settings do.  We're encouraging people to bring their owner's manuals for next time.
• Once again I made the mistake of setting an ISO of 1600 for one photo, and forgetting to turn it back when I had the tripod.  I think the newer cameras are better at this in that they display the ISO on the LCD.  Mine doesn't.  grrrrr.

Photo details: Exposure time 1/60 sec, Aperture f/1.8, ISO 800, Focal Length 50 mm, 35 mm equivalent focal length 82mm, Lens Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, hand held.

Week 16, Day 105, August 14, 2009 "Big Dipper"

Bear with me on this one. We were camping in the woods, and the stars were incredible. I grabbed my camera, and did my first attempt at photographing the stars. I can tell it's going to take some playing with the camera setting to improve my photos, but I was having a lot of fun.

Pictured here is the big dipper. I didn't realize there were so many other stars that you cannot see with your eye The camera picked up several others that are beyond the dipper that I couldn't see. This exposure is for 5 minutes, so there is a shift as the earth rotates. Also not the air plane that went by on the upper left corner.

Lesson Learned:

• I don't know anything about shooting stars yet, but found if very interesting. It took me a while to even get one star to appear.
• The sky is much bigger than I thought. It really requires a wide angle lens.
  

Photo details: Exposure time 301 sec, Aperture f/4.0, ISO 100, Focal Length 40 mm, 35 mm equivalent focal length 65mm, Lens Canon EF 17-40mm, tripod.

Week 13, Day 87, July 26, 2009, "Night Time Tomato Plant"

I did a lot of experimenting with photographs, but I didn't like the results as well as yesterday's rain experiments. (On Facebook, not this blog). It's just one of those days of learning what doesn't work.

This is a photo of our small garden at night with the flood light. I think there is some potential for night time shooting, but I'm not very happy with the results so far.

Lessons Learned:

• Experimenting can be tough, but hopefully it will add to my growing experience. Thomas Edison, "I haven't failed, I've found 10000 ways that don't work." Today I found about 10 things that didn't work.
• Night Time shooting is an excellent way of getting a black back ground.
  

Photo details: Exposure time .8 sec, Aperture f/2.8, ISO 100, Focal Length 70 mm, 35 mm equivalent focal length 113 mm, Lens Canon 70-200mm f2.8L USM, tripod.