Dave’s Photo Blog

Sunday night proved to be almost perfect, with clear blue skies and only a moderate breeze. That’s important, because a strong wind can blow the camera around. When that happens, the ISS/Shuttle that should register as a line in a long exposure can sometimes look all wiggly. Not in this case. In order to minimize any vibrations, I also locked the mirror up using the custom functions of the camera. When the mirror flips up, it can introduce a tiny amount of vibration. It might not register if you were shooting a long exposure of a still life, for example. But when you are shooting a needle thing light trail from space craft, it will show up as a series of bends, or sawtooths, in the line.

It’s not that it was all in my eyes and stuff. It wasn’t. But here’s the deal: I had a polarizer on and that means that I didn’t have the lens shade on, as it won’t fit around my polarizer holder. While I was looking through the viewfinder composing the shot, I couldn’t really see any impacts from shooting fairly directly at the sun. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

In the case of the analysis I’m doing here, the subject matter (and discriminating criteria for the camera) is shooting interior photographs of home movie theatres. And I’m not talking about a plasma screen and HiDef cable either. I’m talking serious, high-end home theatres that cost between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. With that in mind, let’s go back over the top three criteria and get some commentary.

As I’ve obsessed about before, taking photos of the moon is hard enough under normal circumstances. Let me tell you a bit about what I was up against for these pictures as we reach totality.