Night Shoot Experiment #2

So I took another run at trying to get some sweet pictures from taking pictures at night. I had previously looked at a shot that I wanted to get for the night, in the day. I took a couple pictures from a few different angles, waiting for a nice clear night to shoot with the stars in the background.

Day Shot

Night Shot

66mm, ISO 640, 8 second shutter, F/5.6, White Balance: Incandescent

I didn't realize my ISO was up at 640 the whole night, I almost always have it at 200, but I must have shot something earlier that I needed it so high. These are practice shoots to help me learn, and I am learning from my mistakes every time. One of the hardest things for me to do is to get the color that I want to turn out, with using white balance. Some of my other photos have a really red tint to them, but this seemed to work having the white balance set to Incandescent. Then I adjusted the contrast and brightness a tiny bit, while adding a little blur effect around the corners.

One of the other difficulties for this shot was that the boat wouldn't stay still. It keep slowly swinging with the boat sideways to the nose pointing at me. It was very hard to get any good shots with 30 second or 15 second shutters to help bring out the stars more, with out the boat being a little blurred. It was also just all around hard to get a clear focus in the dark. I can barely see the shape of the boat through my view finder. I would just guess if it was in focus take a picture, adjust it, take another picture, until it was in as proper of a focus as I could get. Next time I learned I should bring a flash light of some kind to shine on the object so I can get my camera all focused up.

If you click on the photo to the left you can see the mountains in the background and also a shooting start towards the top of the boat mass. I had to adjust the brightness a ton on the photo, which made it loose some of it's quality, but I enjoy looking at the scenery. I hope I can figure out how to make one turn out really good. I may have to retake some photos and overlay them some how.

Something I love about photography is that it makes you pay attention to detail. You want to get as close as you can to everything and see all it's features. It helps me to view and appreciate God's creation even more. The main purpose of me taking pictures of this sail boat, is because I want to see more then just a sail boat floating in the water. I'm trying to bring out the beauty of the stars at night, that make the sail boat look more interesting with them glittering in the background. It was hard for me to get some good photos of the sail boat with the stars, so I decided to just take a plain old picture shooting straight into the sky, to capture all the stars I could.

If you look at the picture above you can see millions of little white spots, representing stars. It amazes me how large our Universe was created. God could have stuck us in this small enclosed world, but he made it a massive world with not much excuse but to appreciate and to recognize His wonderful creation/power. If you look at the beauty of creation it is hard to say "there is no God". Now take a look at my next photo. I altered the brightness a little bit to bring out all the stars I could, that where captured into the photo.

Just look at the billions of stars in the Universe that my camera can capture in one photo with only 55mm zoom. If you zoom in closely on the bottom right corner, there is a big white spot, that seems to be a galaxy from the looks of it.

Psalm 33:6-8: By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up the depth in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord