The nights drawing in and the clocks going back have set back my newbie camera experimentation...
Got home this evening and it is pretty much dark. I needed to take the dogs out so decided to try a couple of night shots, I had been reading up on techniques etc for a while so thought I would give it a go. The sky was lovely and clear as I left work, but by the time I had got home, picked up the dogs and climbed the Mendips, it had started clouding over...
Lugging my, (heavy) tripod up the hill on a muddy narrow, rocky path whilst trying to keep two mental Springer Spaniels under control in the pitch black was an experience in itself - but I knew the view would be good when I got to the top.
I set up the tripod, mounted the camera, (Canon 600D) with my new (to me) lens that I've been quite excited about, (Canon 17-55mm f/2.8) and using 'live view' to get the focus on something bright in the distance, then went back to the viewfinder to set up the shot as best I can.
I was using some basic settings, all in manual as I am determined not to use any auto settings at all while I am learning. f/8 to get the sharpest image I can, bulb mode timed on my phone and I wanted to shoot as wide as possible to give myself the greatest cropping options. Manual Focus and IS off, remote trigger.
I'm learning by reading a lot about technique, (as much as I can before my impatience to just do it takes over) then getting out and experimenting as much as possible. I knew that any exposure over 13 secs or so will give me star trails, but I'm not overly worried about that tonight as I wanted to keep ISO as low as reasonably possible, (ISO 400) on the 600D. All of these were 60 sec exposures.
I was looking at trying to get reasonable framing and er, focussing on trying to get the focus right - which I found quite a challenge, even with live view at x10. I took quite a few shots, at various stages along my walk - but the dogs were getting fed up with me stopping every five minutes and I was getting hungry so I packed it all up and set off home.
As soon as I had eaten something, I headed up to download the shots into lightroom, (wife is out tonight!). This is when I realised my biggest error of the night... I had used the camera to take a few shots of a watch I am selling on SC yesterday and had set it to JPEG rather than RAW as I wasn't going to edit them at all. I had left it in Medium JPEG setting!
I have been shooting everything in RAW up to now, again as a learning process - and editing the RAW in lightroom. The shots above were edited, but nowhere near as much as I could have done with the RAW
Oh well, I am reasonably pleased with my first attempts and there will be plenty more dark nights to come.
Cheers,
Rob
The aim is to show improvement as you scroll down!
