One of my early frustrations was figuring this out - that cameras aren't great at replicating the exquisite details the human eyes take in and transfer to the brain for final picture stitching.
And yet, sometimes you can get the composition just right. Noisy as hell, but this is a close representation of the sunset reflection I actually saw off the display of my DSLR.
Can't wait to head out with my new upgraded kit too!
Active Shooting Time: 15 min
Review Time: 15 min
Hours To Date: 369.5
The Milky Way over the hills.
I've been wanting to shoot the night sky for long time, but the whole getting out somewhere past the invasive glow of city light pollution and the need to stay up into the wee hours of the morning was always a major scheduling challenge between juggling work and school.
The peak of the Perseids meteor shower was technically on Thursday night, but I shot this series on Friday night - definitely one of those "done is better than perfect" moments. Usually one to research and prep every last detail, I definitely use photography as my test and learn creative space.
That being said, I expected this series to be terrible and it came out pretty well considering I did virtually no prep beyond grabbing my gear and jumping into the car to Joshua Tree National Park. The biggest learning is definitely to pre-focus my lenses to infinity and mark them off - prior to this shoot, I'd always shot the moon or city lights, which I could always refocus on - not an option when you're in near pitch black. Manually focusing in the dark is pretty rough, so most of my shots aren't as pin-sharp as I'd prefer.
Stars and Joshua Trees - a little blurry, but a great learning.
Shooting meteors is probably the most challenging subject I've encountered yet - they're not exactly predictable in terms of which part of the sky or when they'll appear, so it makes composition nearly impossible. I saw some amazingly bright and streaky meteors, but didn't happen to have my camera pointed that way or actively exposing. Still, I got lucky and even caught a couple meteors - hurray for the law of large numbers. I'm definitely inspired to head out to the middle of nowhere more often and shoot the night sky, with or without meteor shower.
Active Shooting Hours: 3
Review Hours: 1
Hours To Date: 357
Moon set around 2am and a faint meteor to the left.
A meteor and the blinky red lights of a passing plane.
The Milky Way behind a Joshua Tree.
Surprise meteor from behind the rocks! Weird composition, but I'm glad I caught it nevertheless!
The supermoon eclipse on Sunday night was actually kind of hard to view on the West Coast, let alone get interesting shots of... as evidenced by the last lunar eclipse I tried to photograph in April 2014. Photographing astronomical phenomena is like trying to play with freaking Goldilocks - last time we had to stay up late for it. This time, it was almost too early and still too light out for a great shot. Last time around, I focused on getting interesting and clear shots of the moon itself by experimenting with exposure times and a tripod. This time around, I stepped up my game to think about interesting composition, but perspective wasn't working out in my favor. The holy grail shot I was going for was a huge moon next to some interesting landscape, but it wasn't dark enough yet when the moon rose and the eclipse started. And it was pretty hazy out by the beach. Seeing the extraordinary images pop up all over the internet, I'm sure I could have gotten it if I traveled for hours to a dark and isolated place with some interesting mountainous backdrop, but that wasn't going to happen given my schedule as of late.
Still, I'm pretty happy with the shots and loved the opportunity to bust out the tripod at the beach. As I posted on Instagram on the moment: Day 5: The beach, a tripod & my DSLR. I'm in my happy place.
Active Shooting Hours: 3 Review Hours: 2 Hours To Date: 283