The smoke from all the California fires has been in our skies for days now. Looked out the window and noticed the moon was really red-orange, so I grabbed the camera!

A night shot of the harbor...had the lens open so long it washed out the moon a bit...




Closeup as best I could get of the moon...

COOL pics!

Yellow cheese?

FR - Thanks for the nice pics. Tripod or steady hand?

Semper Fi 75

Awesome job FR!! I always enjoy your pics...

LBS

I used a pocket-tripod, and I even use the self timer so the camera won't move. This old F-707 is a great camera, but no matter what I try I can't get nice, crisp long exposure night shots. They're okay, but always a little grainy and/or fuzzy... The moon pic is pretty good, it's actual size @ 5 megapixels and full zoom with a lot of background cropped out. It was shot with about a 1 second exposure. The harbor shot is resized down and cropped some, one of several I took using times from 1 to 30 seconds. Took all shots with f8 lens, 100 iso and manual focus to infinity.

Cool shots FR. Wow perfectly still setting.

Love these pics!

Alex

Last night the county came out and sprayed for skeeters, and for some reason they also killed off all the midges! (for a day at least!) SO, for the first time in a LONG time, the admiral & I were able to go up on top of the boat at midnight and enjoy a cup o' joe and some night scenery! Just had to grab the camera! Had to do a little tweakin' of the brightness & contrast & such, but these shots turned out okay. If you click these pictures they link to larger 1024 pixel pics...

This is from the top of the boat, with the camera sitting on the BBQ...the bright lights are 2 of the harbor dike lights, the others are the Saratoga lights on the other side of the lake, 8 miles away...




This is pretty much the same shot but from the dike, without the lights...




A zoom of half the lights across the way. The green is a light buoy...

Nice shots FR. I always like night shots but have not had much luck with them. Guess I'll have to play with the camera settings more so I get used to them.

Great shots!

GFC, Tripod and cable release or timer is your best friend for night shots. For a cool and easy trick, you can use a penlight, or other light source in the foreground to make neat light trace patterns in the image since the shutter will be open for many seconds. Another trick is to use multiple flash bursts on a moving object in the foregound to make multiple images of the moving object in the picture.


None of these are my shots:

I've tried the "bulb" setting on my old 35mm a few times trying to catch lightning. Never worked out for me. You can get some cool pictures when you know what you're doing.

One thing I've found different about shooting long exposure shots in the dark between digital and film, is that very long exposures with digital, points of light will get brighter, but the unlighted background will barely change, just stays dark. If there's a lot of ambient light, the background will lighten up somewhat, but all the "points" of light become overexposed and 'muddy'. However, when shooting on film, the film will continually absorb color via ambient background light, and the background WILL lighten up accordingly... A friend of mine took some 3 minute night shots several years ago on film, and they look like they were shot in the afternoon. The giveaways were that there were stars in the blue sky (slightly elongated from the time the earth moved), and there were long streams of red and white light from cars driving by an adjacent road about 1/4 mile away during the shot. I've tried to get a "blue sky" night shot with digital, never been able to...

BUT---this "problem" works out GREAT for capturing lighting, especially if there's not a lot of "city lights" in the foreground (and there's a lot of lightning!)

---Here's some lightning shots I caught during 30 second exposures, the camera was on a tripod on the dock next to the Party Cruiser. Lightning kept happening in the same area, so it was real easy, several pics are of multiple strikes during one shot...

That's just pretty cool, FR. Thanks for the advice on the shots. I have heard that film is more compounding when it comes to long exposure, whereas the digital is more to keeping true to what is there.

Ahh, a photography thread, one of my many hobbies.

Here's one of my favorite night shots, from our favorite place to stay, on our favorite lake (Table Rock.) Although, if Bull Shoals had some nicer places to stay it could quickly replace this lake as our favorite, but then the lake would probably draw more people.


Nikon D50 50mm f5 25s (un-retouched except for resizing)