The attentive among you may have noticed that there was no photoblog posting yesterday. Sorry about that – I was off camping with my Cub Scout son and forgot to schedule something to post while I was away. Hopefully you’ll forgive me one day.
Talking of camping, I took the camera along (as always) and managed to gather the required shots for the pack web site and Flickr account and also a bunch for myself too. As a result, this week’s offerings all come from Pedernales Falls State Park which lies between Dripping Springs and Johnson City and is about a 30 minute drive from our home. It’s a gorgeous place and, despite the fact that the river is currently merely a trickly, still spectacular thanks to some fabulous rock formations and many deep pools that have so far failed to dry up.
This shot here was taken last night in the camp site and shows just how beautifully clear the skies out there are. This was a 30 second exposure taken with tungsten white balance using the 15mm fisheye lens. All the foreground lighting is spill from the main camp which lay to my left. The biggest problem taking this shot was finding a 30 second window during which no small boys were running in front of me brandishing glow sticks and flashlights! 🙂
Really like your shot and composure !
I am surprised at your f-stop and ISO settings. I have been reading up on creating star trails (taking my scout camping in November) and from what I have read and my past experience, the normal aperture setting for this type of shot would be in the top 3/4 range of your lens. To reduce the amount of light coming in from around you and to try to max out your sharpness. Can you provide any insight to your selection of 3.3 (I don’t know the max aperture for the lens you were using).
Also surprised at the low level of noise while at 2200.
Thanks for sharing and again, great shot.
Nick
Thanks, Nick. In this shot, I was aiming to get stars without trails. When doing this, the critical number is 30 seconds. Exposures longer than that make trails really obvious (I know, I was surprised by how short a time this was but try it – you’ll find I’m right). Given that my shutter speed couldn’t be longer than 30 seconds, I had to juggle the aperture and ISO settings to expose correctly. I used an f/2.8 lens in this case but its one which isn’t as sharp as I would like fully open so I tried stopping down to f/4. This was sharper but I didn’t want to have to set ISO3200 (which is OK on D700 but getting a bit noisier) so I split the difference and chose ISO2200 and f/3.3 giving the result you see here.
The relatively low noise at this ISO setting is a function of the camera. Although I’m a great believer in the adage that you can take great pictures with any camera, I definitely love having the D700 in low light situations like this or when I’m shooting action and need a really short shutter speed.
PS: For star trails, I would definitely use a smaller aperture for the reasons you mention (sharpness). A lower ISO would also be a good idea though I would want to do some experimentation to make sure that the trails were sufficiently bright at the new settings. I’ve still not tried a full star trail shot (involving stacking multiple exposures) since I don’t like the idea of having to either sit outside for hours at night or leave my camera unattended for long periods of time with the intervalometer shooting while I’m not there.
Awesome! I think the glo-sticks would have been kinda cool? Thanks for sharing it Dave.
Justin´s last post ..Crescent Valley – Part I
Thanks, Justin. I actually took quite a few glow-stick shots but none of them were blog-worthy. You’ll likely find them on the pack Flickr account shortly. I’ll add a link here when they are posted.
