Stars and Clouds

Title: Can't see shit.

Just did some long exposures at night.

As you know (well you don’t), I just bought a (cheapo) tripod and a remote release to do long exposures at night. Since HB2 will be going to Carol’s orchard at Rawang next Tuesday, I plan to take some night exposures there. What’s more, the great Leonid meteor shower starts around that time, too. Let’s hope that the lion this year is ferocious enough to bring on a spectacular meteor storm.

So today was my test shot for long exposures. I need to experiment a little before I go for the real shooting, you know. What aperture, what shutter speed, and what ISO... The night was filled with clouds and contaminated by heavy light pollution, since my house is like, duh, just beside the city centre. You should know how bad is it to shoot long exposure at a place with heavy light pollution. Yeah anyway, I did manage to get more than 10 shots, some as short as 6 seconds and some as long as 15 minutes. The 15 minutes shot is, well as you’ve guessed it, overexposed. I used f/16 and ISO 200 for the shot but still, it appears to be too bright.

And some mistakes I did tonight, yeah like, don’t wear bright clothes when doing long exposure if your composition includes a little bit of land, since you may walk into the frame unknowingly. Another thing is that the VR on the lens must be switched off during long exposure. Sometimes I do get unsharp photos because of this. Another thing I’ve forgotten to do is to switch to RAW mode. As I shoot JPEG for 99.9999999999% of my work I very very rarely switch to RAW mode. For long exposures I’d need to use RAW mode to get the widest exposure latitude to reveal very faint stars invisible to the naked eye.

Well guess that it’s for today. I’ll be doing it again tomorrow, so let’s hope that there’ll be less clouds and more stars.