another bright night
i drove jac and RML to Clanton last night, as they'll be flying out to texas for the week with jac's mom & sister. whilst sad (aw), it does free me up a bit to get some photo/video experimentation done without conflicting against anyone's schedule.
after Saturday night's fun in the backyard, i really wanted to drive out into the country and get away from 99% of the city lights and really shoot under the cover of complete "darkness" (in quotes because of the [again] super-bright moon). so i did.
i'd say overall it was a nice, if not entirely successful, adventure. i had to shoot sans 50mm as jac took that with her on the trip. frankly, my entire setup was different from Saturday night's...
- Canon 7D
- Canon EF 24-70mm L (stopped all the way out to its maximum f/2.8 for 99% of the images)
- MacBook Pro (more on that on a second)
- tripod
- patience
- iPhone
- Lensbaby Composer
so, a handful of notes...
- traffic was much heavier (relatively speaking) than i imagined it would be, and it only got heavier the longer i went on. i started to freak a little bit so i wrapped up a little early and bolted home. no sense in stirring the natives.
- as much as i wanted to and planned for it, i never got to slap on the Lensbaby. sad, i know.
- to do some of the closer focusing, i actually pulled out my iPhone to shed some light (har har). i would open up Safari to a new blank page and place the phone where i wanted to focus. i then ran to the camera, turned on auto focus, focused on that spot, switched back over to manual focus, gathered the phone, remetered without refocusing, and snapped away. that easy! on "the road" picture it was almost directly in front; the bush at the lake, i was close enough i could hold and adjust the camera without running back & forth.
the picture of the star trails was a fun experiment. i had to switch over to Bulb to try and get anything, but obviously, sitting there with my finger on the button woulda' caused a ton of camera shake and made everything useless. so i downloaded onOne's Software brilliant little piece of work called (boringly) DSLR Camera Remote.
i connected the 7D to the MacBook Pro via USB (MBP placed behind the camera) and used the iPhone companion app to fire the shutter. even more incredible: when i hit 'Fire' button again to end the shot, the software sends a preview of the captured image to the iPhone app so i could see how well (or, in 90% my shots, how badly) a shot came out, and from there, i can use the iPhone app to adjust aperture and ISO, all without ever touching the camera and risking knocking it out of position.
[overtly technical note: admittedly, if you're not near a WiFi network, the software is useless as the iPhone app depends on connecting with the DSLR Camera Remote software on your computer. fortunately, i was able to create a a wireless access point emanating from the MBP and connect the iPhone to it and get everything working with no problem. of course, i'd worry for those not knowledgeable with how to do that getting frustrated and giving up.]
anywho, the star trails shot is significant here for a couple of reasons...
- it took a whole lotta' patience and ultimately a whole lotta' wasted shots, but i found (for what i was doing) the perfect combo to be ISO 200, f/2.8 (that being the maximum on my lens), and exposure time at 3.5 minutes. i woulda' loved to get more & longer trails, but i found out that anything longer was beginning to blow out shots, making them entirely unusable.
- this was the only photo i really had to play with exposure on in post-processing. i could tell the trails were great, but even at the optimal settings i used, everything was still bordering on blown out. time to find a good tutorial on getting the shot perfect in-camera!
i would like to hit one more spot for now, and that's downtown Montgomery. i thought ASF would be good, but the lights around the park areas would just make it kinda' pointless. plus, i'd likely get kicked out. weather cooperating, i'll head down there sometime this week and do that. i know there are tons of lights downtown, but i think i could get some neat stuff with all the architecture.
and for now, a final word: not that anyone has said anything to me, but i feel i should note that this is in no way "showing off." honestly, so long as anyone knows how to work the Manual controls on their camera and has tons of patience, they can do the exact same thing (provided, of course, they have a lens that will open up wide enough). this is much more of a self-indulgent "proof of concept" than anything else. if you know me, you know i sometimes get on these random tangents of "I WANNA DO THAT AND LEARN IT FOR WIZDOM" and this certainly falls into that category. for now, this is a completely useless new bit of knowledge i've picked up (although i have a couple of interesting ideas for warmer weather).
and now for the rest of the Flickr set: another bright moon. enjoy!
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