I’m back from a week in the Smoky Mountains, which was both relaxing in the “sitting around a campfire all night drinking beer” way, and strenuous in the “let’s hike 30 miles during the week, half of which will be directly up a mountainside” way.
I made some rookie mistakes regarding my photography throughout the week. Above is Exhibit A. Sometimes, you only get one night of clear skies, and when that happens, know that f/22 with an ISO of 100 is a dumb combination of settings. Even with a 52 minute exposure. I wish I could take that one back. It’s something where I really do know what I’m doing, yet I can’t explain how my brain shut off and I ignored what I knew was right. Anyway, this is the only shot from the night, and I had to bump it up 4 stops in post processing to even save what little I could, hence all the noise.
Later in the week I took a dozen shots without the auto-focus on, but I didn’t notice until afterwards.
so, let me get this straight–is the image you showed the 52-minute exposure? I don’t mind the noise so much, really, it adds texture (at least?).
But the streaking of the stars–is that the open exposure time tracking the rotation of the earth? If so, that’s awesome.
Yeah, that one is 52 minutes. If you click through to it on Flickr, you can see all the EXIF info.
I still like it like this, but my biggest problem is I know it could have been so much better, or at least it wasn’t quite what I was going for. There were a lot more stars out that I could’ve also captured as the Earth rotated if I’d thought clearer, and that was the look I really wanted. I think it would have been awesomer.