You might have noticed a couple of bright stars near the moon at sunset. Even the evening news on TV has made mention of the sight.

It is a farely unusual scene… the Moon and two planets… Jupiter, and Venus. I went to the Blue Ridge Parkway on the 26th of February to get some clear air and made this shot.

Some people wonder why you can’t get detail in the moon and and nice sky. I’ll explain.

The moon, planets, and stars are actually very bright. To get detail in the moon and surroundings here on earth is beyond the capabilities of a camera. You have three choices: Detail of the moon. Detail of the landscape on Earth. Or you can Photoshop. The image above is pretty much as it came from the camera. Just a little after sunset the trio was captured in all their brightness with just a little detail of the evening sky.

Exposure info: f/6.3 at 15 seconds with ISO of 800. To get great detail in the moon, it might have meant an exposure of about 1/160th of a second.

This photo also appeared on Spaceweather.com.

We hope to have dates for new classes posted in a few days. It is a challenge finding a great venue for a reasonable price and having specific dates open. Suffice it to say, we will have numerous offerings in January into March in Atlanta, Charlotte, Greenville, Columbia, Asheville, and Nashville… and likely a few other cities as Spring arrives.

Let’s start with ISO. I use 100. Some cameras will only go to 200. Yes, it’s dark outside but you’ll use reeeeally slow shutter speeds which let in a lot of light.

The shutter speed that I think works best is 10-15 seconds. It is a bit of a balancing act between enough time for colorful trails and too much time… which ends up with numerous explosions and lots of smoke.

If you open the aperture up too much the fireworks will be too bright. Somewhere around f/11-f/16 seems good.

I use a cable release and a tripod. Just don’t even try it hand held. As soon as you see one launch, hit the button. Also, I focus on lights in the distance and flip the lens to manual focus after that. All that is so the camera won’t try to focus on the night sky (unsuccessfully). You may even be able to use auto focus to get the fireworks sharp when some go off… then put the lens back on manual focus so the lens doesn’t have to focus again.

July 4th, 2011

White balance (some call it color balance) is nothing more than the way your shot is tinted with color. It has nothing to do with exposure… things like ISO, shutter speed, or aperture. It is simply a personal choice on how you like the color cast in your pictures. Most of the time it is a choice between cool (blue) and warm (yellow/orange). (See the photos below)

If you’re shooting under fluorescent lights which are yellow/green, the camera can add the opposite colors to make the shot look a bit more normal. Tungsten, or incandescent, is primarily for shooting indoors if your scene is lit by regular old light bulbs. This choice will add some blue to counter the orange-ish light bulbs. Daylight, cloudy, and shade choices might add some yellow/orange to warm up your photo due to all the blue your picture picks up from the sky.

What if you choose the wrong one? The disk of software that came with your camera, or programs like Photoshop can fix the problem… as can the place where you take the shots to be printed.

What do I use? I virtually never use AUTO functions on my camera including AWB (Auto White Balance). They get close, but not close enough. I shoot in Raw and generally choose Cloudy, Incandescent, or Fluorescent, depending on the light I’m in. ~Gene

Tungsten Color Balance Outdoors

Daylight Color Balance

How many of you wish you could change the focus once you look at a picture? More than once I’ve done that. Ahhh. the picture would have been so nice if the lens (or me) had focused on the singer… and not the microphone a foot in front of his face!

A couple of years ago I was telling my classes about a new technology that will allow you to find a different point of focus AFTER you shoot your picture. The cameras are almost here.You may have seen one of the stories on the innerwebs over the last few days. Here is the best one yet… a video news report from MSNBC showing the idea in action.

A fellow named Tom Lowe has done some amazing work in regards to time lapse. Here is a video. Some of the shots use gear to move the camera a tiny bit between shots, giving the videos a look you may never have seen before.

Many of our still cameras also do video. Vincent Laforet has mixed time lapse stills with video in this amazing clip.

When I go from ISO 100 to ISO 200, I have made my camera twice as sensitive to light. Then to 400, it doubles. Ditto for going to 800.

Well, the same thing happens when I go from ISO 6400 to H1. It makes the camera twice as sensitive… so I guess the number becomes ISO 12500 or thereabouts. And H2 is ISO 25000. Going the other way, if I go from ISO 100 to L1, the ISO is actually 50.

For Nikon you will see ISO settings like H.3 and H.7.  The ISO setting H.3 means ISO 1600 (or whatever your highest actual number is) plus one third (or 0.3) of a full stop. That works out to ISO 2000. ISO H.7 is ISO 1600 plus 2/3rds (0.7) of a stop = ISO 2500

ISO H1 is ISO 1600 plus a full stop = ISO 3200.

You’ll likely have to turn off AUTO ISO to get to the really high stuff. Also, most of the fully automatic modes will likely never go there.

Why don’t Canon and Nikon call is something other than H1, H2, and L1? I just don’t know. Maybe it’s to keep beginners from getting really noisy/grainy photos and thinking something’s wrong with the camera.