Friday, November 28, 2008

2819 seconds in the woods






Rob and I headed down to World's End park today in Hingham to shoot, and promptly got rained on. Not drizzled on, but dumped on (the second photo was taken during the rain). That was eight hours ago. My feet just got dry ten minutes ago.

Anyway, after the rain finally stopped, the sun broke out and it ended up being a pretty nice day - too nice. No clouds, no fog, nothing. The best landscape photos live on the edges of weather - our edge came and left the first 15 min. we were in the field.

When it got dark, the sky was really clear, and there was no wind at all, so we thought it would be cool to try to shoot some star trails. Neither of us really had any experience with them, or really had any idea what we were doing at all, but off we went.

The first order of business was to find a place sufficiently dark enough that light pollution and ambient light wouldn't be a factor. For this, I have to thank my awesome friend Elena. She lives near the area we were shooting, and sent us off a spot she knew in Norwell.

So there we were, standing in the middle of the woods, with Rob cracking axe murderer jokes, trying to figure out how to calculate an exposure. He had his lightmeter with him but it was too dark to even register a reading.

Crap.

Ummmm. So we fired off a test shot on his 1ds II, F/8 ISO 1600 4 min. (we literally just picked a time out of the air, we knew we wanted F/8 or so, but beyond that...yeah, nothin'). Turned out OK, so we did a little math and shot two more frames, a 24 min. exposure at F/8, and this, 48 min. at F/11.

Not much post production here, btw, just some noise reduction and sharpening.


-Doug Levy - Massachusetts Landscape Photographer -

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