In the dim reaches of the past I carried an Olympus OM-1 trying to photograph nature. I can think of four photos I took that were worth keeping. Among all of the failures, there were three scenes that I tried repeatedly to capture: the night sky Milky Way in color, a small stream with blurred waterfalls, and the setting sun’s green flash. I devoted untold dozens of rolls of Kodachrome, Plus-X, and Tri-X 35mm film to the project. Yet I was never able to capture any of them.
It wasn’t that I got bad images, I got no images at all. Tri-X is a black and white ISO 400 film. It works for night photography. But, in my experiments I was led into a dead end. I tried for long exposures; in the range of 5 minutes. This never yielded any Milky Way images, just blurry star trails. I was under the impression that I would need a clock-drive mechanism to compensate for the earth’s rotation; which was out of my budget. As time went on, I put the camera away and forgot the projects.
I’ve read some articles that lead me to believe that with a digital camera I should be able to get Milky Way images with 20 to 30 second exposures. This will be long enough to capture the Milky Way but not long enough to blur the stars.
So, off I go to try again. Living here in the Pacific North-wet I have an issue with clouds. Even in my travels to the desert this year, the skies have been mostly cloudy.
Here is a shot that I took as a test. The sky glow is due to the rising full moon. The red lighting the foreground is from my headlamp. I’ll have to be more careful and turn it off next time. For me, the take away is that it should be possible to accomplish the photograph. But I’ll need a dark southern sky. The end of July might work.
The above shot is one of a sequence of photos I shot of this Juniper as the sun set. I set up the camera on a tripod and clicked off shots every 20 minutes from sunset to full dark. There was a full moon this night and I was shooting to the south. So, the sky is too light and full of noise. However, I was amazed at how many stars I could actually capture with the camera in Auto mode.
Here is the first photo in the series. All of these are shot with the camera in Auto mode. The idea is to see just how well I can get the machine to perform. In this shot the tree is in the yellow light of sunset. I have good focus so I lock down the focus and shoot without touching those controls.
The next photo was taken just about an hour later. It is full dark. Amazingly the camera corrects the lighting enough that sky is still blue. It was dark to my eyes when this photo was taken.
For this last shot I put the camera into Manual mode and shot a fifteen minute exposure. The goal was to get star trails, but the sky is almost too bright to see them. I can even see the light from the rising moon reflected from the juniper just to the left of the subject.
I happened to remember the Black Light flashlight that I acquired last fall. I’ve heard that scorpions glow in black light. Well here I was at night, waiting for the moon to rise, with a black-light—let’s try it out. A quick scan of the rocks on the escarpment surrounding my camp revealed four! Awesome. Now if I could only get a photograph.
Well as you can see from the following photograph, it’s hard to focus at night, even for the Z-camera’s autofocus.
But I was so excited that the camera even picks up the green color with which they glow in the dark. It was also clear the scorpions aren’t that rare in Oregon. I’ll have to keep my eye out for others.
It’s clear that I will have to practice more with the camera at night. On the Olympus OM-1 the lens had a positive mark for an infinity focus, this Nikon does not.
It was a great lesson to start with the tree against the sky. I can put the camera in autofocus mode while it is still light and then after I have focused, I put the lens in manual focus mode and avoid touching the focus ring. It doesn’t help with scorpions, but I hope it will help with the Milky Way. Now, if only the clouds would clear.