Taiwan
We made a short trip to Taiwan because my parents got their hands on some free tickets. Provided below is a mandatory boring tourist picture of locals letting go of a sky-lantern:
f/5.6, 1/100 s, ISO 640, 18-55@32 mm, Nikon D5000
I got to test out some new skills I've been reading up on, specifically astrophotography. This is the first holiday where I brought along my flimsy tripod that came with my camera. Its flimsiness also made it really light and convenient to carry around. I tried out HDR on the ugly view outside our hotel room. I did it the hardworking way, taking three separate exposures of the same scene using bracketing instead of the D5000's dodgy built-in HDR function. The result was rather anti-climatic:
f/3.5, 3-5 s, ISO 250, 18-55@18 mm, Nikon D5000
We also went to the beach. It was a really crowded beach, full of noisy young people and boomboxes, a far cry from Wales. But the Pacific surf was rich and blue:
f/5.6, 1/640 s, ISO 200, 55-200@200 mm, Nikon D5000
I was lucky that one of the nights fell on a waxing crescent, which allowed me to try shooting the stars. I've never done this before but I've read up loads on it. It was the reason why I brought my tripod along. However, I don't have a full-frame camera and my kit lens had at weak maximum aperture of f/3.5-4 (I don't know how it decides) at 18 mm (its lowest focal length) so I had to compromise. So I took my things to the lake outside the hotel at about 2200h and shuttered away. As you can see from the blue flares, light pollution from the hotel building was pretty heavy:
f/4, 20 s, ISO 3200, 18-55@18 mm, Nikon D5000
Here's a shot of the stars above me, out of reach of vegetation. I only realised how badly composed it was afterwards; I got too carried away by the multitude of stars and the fact that my camera seemed to be able to 'see' more than my eyes:
f/4, 30 s, ISO 2500, 18-55@18 mm, Nikon D5000
It was an awe-inspiring first astrophotography experience and I'll certainly be doing this more. Stars always have such a beautiful diminishing effect on humans; it reminded me of what Feynman said about them:
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.
*
Post-script 14/7/2017: Many of the stars came out blue because I hadn't discovered the 'remove chromatic aberrations' check box in Camera Raw then, despite discovering the luminance function. I also appear to have sloppily focused at infinity instead of focusing on a star. These and the vignetting didn't bother me as much when I upgraded to a full-frame D610 which was much better at preventing chromatic aberrations and more accurate at focusing (at infinity), particularly after I slowly learnt to work with different environments and light profiles with more practice.
Comments
Post a Comment