Weekend photos (sort of)

I found somewhere else with a monitor that actually works, and noted that I need to repair my monitor this evening. Or maybe it’s the video card. I need to repair something, anyway.

The photos are uploaded, but because of the seemingly haphazard and random methods I used to get them onto Flickr, they are in a seemingly haphazard and random order on there. Still, they do represent collections of pixels what I have made, so I guess that they still count.

This one, Saturday’s sunset while we were actually trying to spot the Space Station pass (we did, but it was less impressive than the sunset) is a favourite, but it’s this rather dark one which excites me most.

I wrote here about my desire to improve my photography a bit, and it was through a link to this webpage and a fair bit of tinkering in the icy cold darkness of Suiderstrand over the weekend that I managed to get that shot. It represents a 25 minute exposure, having played around with a million settings to get that far.
Given that it was so very, very cold and I was only bolstered by a sweatshirt and a couple of glasses of brandy, I’d love to have taken things further, but didn’t. With hindsight, I probably should have stuck it out and gone again for something longer. It was an incredibly clear, crisp night, with close of zero light pollution. There will be others though.

But this horribly imperfect image (it’s actually a lot more perfect than the several test shots that went before it) lays down a baseline for future efforts. As that helpful webpage says:

Like anything in photography, but the best way to learn anything is through trial and error and learning through your mistakes… Play around and experiment, it’s the only way to learn, at the end of the day there’s no harm in taking duds, that’s what the delete button is for.

I did this. I followed all the instructions. I tweaked to make the light shots darker, the dark shots lighter, and in the end I got something to build on. Watch this space, but equally, don’t hold your breath.

They’re stars, by the way. Stars.

Leave a Reply