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Night boulevard, streetlights
stand like shimmering
beacons to the otherworld:
a girl crossing beaded with rain;
wind carries her words to those
long gone, shadows now
across the road on the warehouse
wall, graffiti left by an aerosol artist
and she, alone, pauses, midstream
as traffic rushes past, conversing
with some invisible companion
and when she turns our way and
sees us watching, startled by what
we know not and do not see, her
gaze goes through us, a beam
of darkness, her eyes unfocused
on this world, turning away now,
following a call farther down
the road, a shrill cry beyond
this moment where others wait.
--M deO
And thank you to VeraJane Vickers for this song by Ed Sheeran which does capture the sentiment behind the poem/image: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAWcs5H-qgQ
The night food market in Stone Town, zanzibar. The food here is amazing and the atmosphere is great.
I had a bad day. The final touch were bridges - i live at the other coast of the river.. no tripod was available, all i had was VR and it did a decent job
The night sky with the moon and the city of Moshi . The orange stripe by mount Neru was an airplane during the long exposure of this shot taken from Karanga Camp at 13200 feet high. Kilimanjaro National Park.
As darkness envelops the heart of a farm place, a lone cat sits near the edge of the grass near the barn hoping to catch an unwary mouse for a late snack. Nearby in the barn, a sheep lies safely tucked behind a gate that limits its life experiences. Night settles like dark dew on a quiet scene as the noises of the day take a rest as well.
Growing up as an inquisitive lad, I often asked my mother to tell me what it was like to live without electricity. Among all the tales she would tell me, her greatest appreciation for modernization later in her life was centered on two items: one, indoor toilets and two, the ability to switch on lights when it turned dark.
Younger generations today have little comprehension of the added difficulties life without electricity provided, especially for those of us on the farm. Farmers had to time their livestock chores, including milking, around the sun’s schedule. And, it was no picnic to feed hungry, snuffling pigs in the dark who were willing to knock you off your feet in their crowding eagerness to get at the feed you were carrying.
Even after we got elementary electricity, normal chores took on an eerie quality when done in the near dark. I well remember times of scooping ground corn into five gallon buckets and walking through the barn, out the silo room door and stepping into the darkness to find dark, impatient shadows waiting for me to dump the feed into long wooden troughs.
As a teenager, it wasn’t as bad as simple maturity allowed a more reasoned appreciation of the dark. But when a farm kid is in their single digits, night time activity took on a more sinister mood. Quick moving dark figures that if seen in the light were only cows appeared a lot more ominous when the nearest light pole holding up a dim bulb was 30 yards away and spread little light.
The mere hoot of an owl or the bark of a neighbor’s dog across the dark night air stirred momentary fear. My greatest apprehension was to be the last sibling done with his chores and to hear the distant house door slam shut and to be left all alone.
When I recently recounted those distant childhood fears to my longtime nightly companion she said she now understands why I often leave a light on at night when I go to bed.
(Photographed near Nobles County, MN)
Night ATV races going in the background (source of the light glow below the dunes), as Milky way shines brightly - @ Little Sahara - Utah
R-77 901 (GE SL50, 1983) is leading a work train through 5th Ave/53rd St station, en route from Jamaica Yard to Fresh Pond Yard. Most subway work equipment moves are made at night to avoid disturbances in the intense rush periods for commuters.
R77 (GE SL50, 1983)
5th Ave/53rd St station
53rd St Line - IND
Howto:
1) Wait for a cloudlness, moonless night. Or do it after moonset or before moonrise. The moon is really really bright and it washes out the stars.
2) Set camera to continuous shooting mode. This is the mode where if you hold down the shutter release, it will just take picture after picture after picture... Set the shutter speed as long as it will go without BULB -- This is probably 30 seconds. You can experiment with different ISO and F/numbers, but generally you're going to want low F/number and high ISO. These were F/3.5 and ISO 1600.
3) put it on a tripod.
4) Focus. I've found that racking the focus all the way toward infinity doesn't quite work -- it focuses PAST infinity. So I have to focus it all the way out and then bring it back just a smidge.
5) use something to hold the shutter release button down. I used a wire wrapped around the camera with a piece of paper wadded up over the shutter release button. That keeps the button down so the camera takes picture after picture after picture...
(I'd recommend using RAW mode if you know how to process raw images. That way, you don't have to worry about white balance, and you can stretch the images appropriately without causing too much degradation.)
6) Wait a few hours. Now you've got 200 photos where the stars are slightly offset and the foreground stays relatively stationary.
(If you've used RAW images, then you now load em into your RAW processing program, set the white balance so the sky is not red, adjust for noise, etc, etc... You can process them all simultaneously with Adobe Camera RAW, and other programs probably have that same functionality...)
7) Get www.startrails.de/html/software.html and load up those images. Now it'll do two things. First it will combine all the images to smooth out the unchanging parts, getting rid of noise. Use a large number of frames to smooth it out more. Then it will essentially do a brighten command with each frame, painting the stars over the smoothed background.
Voila!
I forget exactly how many images are combined here but I think it's a bit over 200.
Other things:
Stars move fastest around the celestial equator and slowest near the celestial poles. The North Star is at the North celestial pole. If you took 200 pictures of it, it'd hardly move at all. If the camera is pointed west or east, the stars will trail faster.
Stars circle around the celestial poles, so towards the celestial equator, the trails will be fairly straight, but near the North star, they will make more pronounced circles. This image is wide angle and looking east, so the North Star is towards the top left. The effect is quite noticable.
Higher focal lengths (more zoomed in) will make stars trail faster, but I think wide angle shots usually work better. This one is at 18mm on a 1.6x crop camera.
Those weird straight lines are airplanes. There are two in this image. You may also catch sattelites and shooting stars.
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Horseguards Parade by moonlight.
SMC Pentax-M f1.4 @f2. Not the sharpest at the edges at wide apertures, but great in the centre.
I noticed there were shots of Aurora on Facebook on Thursday evening so I thought I would have a look outside. We are surrounded by hills and tall trees close to the house so it was unlikely I would see the lights. However, the sky was clearing and I could see the Milky Way overhead so fetched the camera and stood in the darkness for a while taking a handfull of shots.
This is the view to the north west and that might just be a touch of aurora glow too, but I am not convinced.
I was tempted to crop out the lights from the house and the image is quite noisey; I am never sure how to process this type of shot.