April 12th, 2004:

(click to enlarge)

Exposure Time: 30 seconds
Aperture: f/3.8
Focal Length: 20mm
ISO: 200

This is a long exposure at a wide aperture with medium speed “film”. In other words, it was very dark. It was nearly impossible to see the power lines in the sky with the naked eye, let alone through the camera’s viewfinder. It’s not the most artistically pleasing photograph ever made, but I like it for its technical merits.

I was encouraged to take a shot like this by Justin who introduced me to the concept of photographing stars. The spots you see in the sky (in the larger version) aren’t hot pixels, and they aren’t planes. They are indeed stars (or planets). What’s most interesting is that, if you view the full version of this image, you can see that the stars aren’t dots but instead diagonal lines. No, I didn’t move the camera. You can tell by the sharpness of the electrical towers. This happens because the Earth is spinning and the stars themselves are orbiting the center of our galaxy. Everything is moving. Stars move a lot more than you think in 30 seconds. I’m not sure if the bright spot behind the tower on the far right is a star or a planet or just a light. I don’t remember a light being there, but it is much brighter than the rest and doesn’t have the diagonal pattern. This shot was taken with the camera pointed, approx., East by North East this evening at, approx., 10:45pm. Anyone have any idea what this might be?

I’d love to try a 10 minute exposure just to see how far they move. However, the camera’s timer maxes out at 30 seconds. It has a “bulb” option but I don’t know if it would stay open for longer than 30 seconds even in that mode. Even if it would, I don’t know of a lockable shutter release available for this camera that would keep me from having to hold the shutter release myself (and shake the camera) for 10 minutes.

I used Phocal, an application for my Nokia 3650 phone, to calculate the hyperfocal distance to ensure I would have the maximum amount of “in focus” area since I had to use such a wide aperture to keep within 30 seconds of exposure time. I highly recommend it to all Photographers who are also 3650 owners.

We were looking for wildflowers, you see. So, signs stating “dead end, no lake access, no turnaround” didn’t really detour us — just because I can’t get to the lake and I can’t turn around doesn’t mean there aren’t wildflowers down there.

This lead to quite a few twenty-seven point turns on dirt roads at steep inclines. On one ocassion, it seemed like the road we were following led straight to someone’s house and no futher. Just as I was realizing this and deciding to turn around, three dogs emerged from the property. The surrounded my truck and bit at my tires. I’m sure I spent over 15 minutes making small adjustments when they were distracted in order to get my vehicle pointed in the other direction without hitting the dogs. As soon as we drove off, the dogs left us alone.

I’m not sure if they were trained this way by their owners, or of they were being protective by instinct. I’m sure it has something to do with their owners as they had no interest in us at all once we were turned around. In fact, after the dogs realized what I was doing (which took quite some time) they even moved to the other side of the truck to continue barking, leaving me a nice hole to get out.

If it weren’t for the lives of the dogs, I would have liked to have just drove off without paying attention to them at all. Hopefully, their getting hit would help convince their owners that they should consider a fence or a leash or something.

This image is a bit of a failure. My goal was for the sign in the lower left hand corner to be readable. Unfortunately, due to the rust on the sign, and its relative size to the rest of the image, I realized after the fact that it was nearly impossible. The sign is entirely readable, but only at full size. Still, I really liked the composition of this image, so I decided it was worth keeping on that merit alone.