Night Photography

September 12, 2012

I have been expermenting with night photography, this picture below was taken with a Nikon 5100, exposure time was 60 minutes (8:55-9:55) with an F11 aperture, ISO 100 film speed VR on, focal length 18mm and manual focus. 

Ironically I believe I have the north star in the picture by accident but an added plus. A plus from ambient lighting is illuminating the leaves on the trees. 

So the next night I tried doing a one hour exposure at F22 and the results weren't as anticipated. Was hoping for a darker background ..Photo was darker from smaller aperture but the star trails were dimmer.

Apparently I need a darker area with less ambient light to create a darker background and be able to use a larger aperture like F8 or F5.6 to highlight the star trails. 

The moon shoot was August 30,2012. It was in reality a blue moon or second full moon of the month, anytime there is a full moon in 29 days it is considered a blue moon which apparently only happens every few years. This happened to be the  night before the full moon but I couldn't  tell the difference. The above picture is after I processed the pic on software to highlite being a blue moon, the unedited picture is below. 

The picture below was taken at about 6 am and exposed for about 30 minutes. The sun was coming up so the sky colored blue but still showed the star trails looking east. 

Bows and Arrows

September 9th, 2012

We took Jessica to the Sportsmans club today so she could shoot her bow. She spent almost 3 hours shooting ! 

There were some pretty cool clouds so I snapped some pics of those.

Seeing stars

August 28th, 2012

Decidided to try some nighttime photography. This is a 30 minute exposure @100 ISO @ F11

The moon shoot was 1/5 sec F11 100 ISO and then tone mapped to color it, this was the night before the actual full moon which was a blue moon. The night of the full moon was also the night Neil Armstrong was laid to rest.

Exploring day!

August 11th, 2012 Saturday

Today the plans are to visit a nearby lighthouse on Lake Superior, no longer in use but open to the public.  Point Iriquois was the name of it and you can climb to the top of the light house. 

Then we went to Tahquamenon Falls, both upper and lower. These falls are about 50 feet tall. The lower falls were like a series of falls.
 

Then off to whitefish point known for where the Edmund Fitzgerald was near where it sunk back in 1975. Whitefish point is awesome, the waves there are very active, the water is cold and deep blue. I took some photos and videos and collected some rocks from the beach. The museum is a definite must see with some really cool stuff on ship wrecks and Edmund display. 

Anniversary day! 32 years

August 9th, 2012 Thursday

We arrived here at the campground around 12:30, the weather is much cooler and this makes for a nice change. We are at Soo Locks campground for the next 6 days and we have a pretty nice spot looking down a boat canal at the St Mary's river with our Rv backed up to it. Rates are only $27 a day and we have water and electric hookups. Pretty busy little campground and close to the Soo Locks boat tours. After arriving we walked to the end of the pier to look at the river and snapped a few pictures, the we ate lunch and layer down to take a nap, I succeeded but Deanna did not..

After waking up we decided it was time to go find a car wash to clean her car after the trip down that road to Sturgeon Valley campground. Well we got distracted and ended up taking the Soo Locks boat tour, it's about a 2 hour tour ( unlike the USS Minnow we made it back) and includes going through the locks from Lake Huron into what a little farther down the river is Lake Superior. The difference between the two was a 21 foot rise in the locks and took about 12 minutes. 

 
Inside the locks.
 Locks almost full and ready to move through, ahead on the right is a good sized freighter waiting to move into the locks. 
This is the freighter Chestnut hauling iron ore pellets, we saw it our our return to the docks as it was about to leave or side heading east. 

Another freighter heading into the locks as we are exiting..

Just looking up the river to the west. 
The international bridge going from Sault Ste Marie Michigan to Sault Ste Marie Canada. Half way across the bridge but not shown in this picture a an American and a Canadian flag signifying the point to crossing.
This is a island that was created by diggings mineral out of the water which extends from here to Minnesota (the mineral that is). The island is now used as a place for a steel foundry owned by India and employing 3000 people. They make sheet steel in multitudes of  grade and ship by freighter due to the weight of the rolls.

This is coming back through the Canadian locks with the the gates closed and ready to drop us the 21 feet to get back down to the river level. 

 Locks almost empty

Here is one of out campground and our Rv. 

Overnight stop

We made it to our stopping point for the day, 435 miles and we are at Sturgeon Valley as it is now called. The previous owners gave it back to original owners after 8 years.. We left at 7am and arrived here about 4. We stopped and ate our lunch at a rest area and had entertainment of watching 2 kids get arrested for something which appeared to be drugs as they were searching the doors and under the engine pretty well..

We only have about 115 miles to go in the morning so we don't have to be up early. About 40 miles to the Mackinac bridge and another 60 to the next campground.

Well we got some rain over night which helped wash off the car, the road coming back to this campground I would guess is considered a seasonal road as it is not paved but hard packed dirt and was recently graded. Talk about ROUGH! 8-10 mph is the safest and even that will shake your teeth out, I hope much of Alaska isn't like this or it will take a year to get back!

I played around with the camera last night as I wanted to take a timed exposure of the space station flyover but there were to many clouds but I still took some experimenting shots:

This is a 30 second shot on ISO 100 film at a F5.6 aperture and it was 9:45pm and pretty dark.

Now take a look at the picture below taken a few minues later but at Hi2 ISO film speed at F 5.6 apetureand only 4 seconds!

The major thing you can notice is the second photo is really grainy which wouldn't look good enlarged.

I'll try for the space station later this week if it clears up. I need to use a little larger aperture setting to keep the background darker as the space station will appear as a streak of light across the picture so the darker sky will really make it pop out. 

Well time to pack and move, in a nit we will be in Sault Ste Marie, seems like Sault could have been spelled a lot easier!

Soo ready for vacation!

August 7th, 2012 Tuesady evening

Well we finally got some much needed rain over the last week or so. One of the driest summers in a long time and hot! Now we are into some nice weather with temps in the 60's in the morning.  This afternoon it warmed up pretty well though. I brought the Rv home at noon so Deanna could start loading it but to my surprise the engine battery was dead as can be, actually only checked .5 volts! I jumped it and got it running  brought it home and let it run for a while to help charge it back up but had to go buy a charger anyway. Needed a charger for the Alaska trip next year anyway I suppose for safety measure. 

So after getting home I went for a 5 mile bike ride with my friend Brad. Just rode outside of town and back but it makes for a nice relaxing ride. Just bought this bike a month or so ago after retiring my old 10 speed from 1980.  Have put about 60 miles on it since picking this one up, I often ride it to work if the weather is nice enough. With coming home for lunch that pus about 4 miles a day on it. 

Well this evening Deanna has everything loaded in the Rv for our trip tomorrow. Seven days of vacation to the Soo Locks in Michigan. Our friend Malia bragged about this place so much we decided we had to go.  Some side trips will be Mackinaw Island and some falls that I'm not even gonna try to spell along with the Soo Locks boat tour! I'll write about it after we have been there and perhaps I will be able to spell it by then. 

On a side note, last Saturday I took a photography class that Bill and our friend Dave Milliner put on. They started a local camera group called Champaign Camera Group. 35 years ago I really enjoyed shooting 35 mm cameras but it has chaned so much now with the technical age.  I ought a Nikon 5100 and got a 300mm zoom lens for it. I swear I forgot everything I ever knew about photography and it is all just starting over, but it's a lot of fun and they did a heck of a job putting the class on. It was a full house with 9 students and we touched all the basics and got a teaser on photo software. I just picked up a $15 shutter release that is programmable so I can do some time night exposure shots. Some of the space station flybys and star rotations along with some night time shots of the big boats since we will be right on the lake. I will post those also when I get them. 

Soo (pun intended) in the morning we will be off. We will be towing the cobalt behind us for transportation once we get there. Our overnight destination is in a town called Wolverine Michigan to a campground called Sturgeon River. We stopped there back in 2004 on a trip to Minnesota and after telling them we were going to travel full time in the Rv nthey offered us a job to work camp. Before that trip was over we had two job offers.  The second one was working for a friend in Minnesota who owned a KOA.  Anyway, we will spend the night at Sturgeon before making into the locks. The second part will only be a hundred miles or so. Oh this is a trip for our 32nd anniversary on the 9th.