I left for Dartmoor at around 10pm to arrive at Bowerman's for around 10:40pm to set up all the equipment I needed to take the photographs, I began by checking all of my equipment to make sure it was all charged and ready to use.
Unfortunately the night was particularly cold, much colder than the previous night I visited the Nose, so my equipment did suffer from the rapid change in temperature.
Here is a sample photo I shot on location:
Photo Factfile
Shutter Speed: 5 minutes
Aperture: f 4.0
ISO: 1600
I found the light situation to be very different on the night, as it gave this photograph, which was shot at exactly the same settings as the one I did previously at Bowerman's Nose around 3 weeks before, so clearly another element of light had a play in this result.
The Moon
The moon was out when I visited this time which has clearly had an effect on both the foreground subject lighting and the exposure of the star trails, as a result I had to alter some settings to enable a good photograph to still be taken, and make the most of the excellent evening conditions.
Photograph 2
For this one I made a few changes to the initial sample photo settings as the image was overexposed, so I knocked a minute off the total exposure time and went for another try, here is what I shot:
Photo Factfile
Shutter Speed: 4 Minutes
Aperture: f 4.0
ISO: 1600
The exposure has improved since I dropped the shutter speed back to 4 minutes although the moon is still causing the star trails above to become dimmer and not stand out as much as they did on my initial visit.
Anyway I decided to go for a longer exposure and see what sort of result I could get:
Photo Factfile
Shutter Speed: 12 minutes
Aperture: f 8.0
ISO: 1600
I wanted to do another test to see if closing the aperture slightly would help to reduce the ambient light which was in the sky due to the moon being to the left as this time.
After looking at the image above, I can see that it would be difficult to try to reduce the effects of the ambient lighting and that the aperture changes are just making the process take longer, rather than reduce any impact of ambient lighting.
Photograph 3
As for the next photograph, I decided to revert back to the standard f 4.0 setting to allow as much light into the camera as possible so I could see many more star trails above, the photo below was shot at these settings:
Photo Factfile
Shutter Speed: 35 minutes
Aperture: f 4.0
ISO: 200
This photo can't be used for any presentation unfortunately, because the camera misted up while shooting the image, as the temperature dropped away so much after dusk, the camera steamed up and produced this image.
As for the calculations for ISO and shutter speed, these are shown below:
ISO |Timescale
100 80 minutes
200 40 minutes
400 20 minutes
800 10 minutes
1600 5 minutes
I decided to go for the 40 minute wait time as I was concerned about the longevity of my battery due to the cold conditions, however after remembering how over exposed the initial photograph was that I did for 5 minutes, I decided to cut the exposure short to 35 minutes, to try to prevent any overexposure in the image.
Unfortunately when i went to review this image, I saw the misty image and put the shoot down to an experience building exercise as the image was/is useless to me.
This is how the camera looked afterwards:
Evaluation of the Shoot
As for the composition of these images, the previous Bowerman's images do have the edge, because of the reasons I discussed in that blog entry but these ones here, simply do not present the Nose in the correct position, so I am going to look back at my other photographs and attempt some different locations with a new technique.
I will also be taking temperature more seriously now by getting my camera ready for the low temperatures by loading it into the boot of my car around 2 hours before I head out on a photo shoot.
As for the photo shoot as a whole, it didn't go very well, it was too cold for the camera and the composition was poor so the image didn't come out to the standard that I wanted, so I am just going to write it off as an exercise, as it was still useful to me to build my knowledge and skill of star photography.
No comments:
Post a Comment