Well all the hard work has paid off. Here is a photo of the Pleiades.
After weeks of fully clouded skies days and nights… We had a clear night. And was I tired. I just went to bed.
I woke at about 4:30am, and went out and set up a reception experiement for weather satellite photos, and saw the sky was cool and clear…
So I brought all the equipment out to my back patio.. did a quick polar alignment with my red dot finder. Put the camera on and took a few test shots of a star.
It seemed to work for a 30 second photo… AND I focused by eye! The stars were so bright I could see them in the viewfinder.
And Oh Oh!.. There is Jupiter and to the left plain as day is the Pleiades, So I aimed the camera at it as best I could and took 12, 30 second shots… Stacked them… no calibration frames, cropped it and that’s what I got. Nice round stars!
We went out taking photos yesterday, and on the way back, we passed a little pond that’s on one of the streets we take. From the car I could see a great blue heron standing in the pond.. So it was exciting to have the camera in the car for this opportunity.. I got out of the car and took shots as I came closer to the pond, but Herons, are skittish birds, so it quickly moved away before I got close enough — 200mm is just not enough for skittish birds.
But as I stood on the grass next to the pond, I noticed a small flock of mallard ducks, waddling towards me. How amazing. Obviously they know the routine.. a human stands there, they come over and get fed something. Unfortunately I had no food for them, but I got a bunch of shots and a few good ones (at end of the post).
I started thinking.. Hey I could get a neat low angle video of these ducks milling around if I brought some actual duck food next time… So I looked in to what is good food for a duck and found out… ITS NOT BREAD… So it’s going to take some time to pick a duck feed for them… I’m not really looking forward to handling meal worms… but maybe cracked corn…
So this afternoon, we passed the pond again, and the resident Canada Geese flock was there… for a fleeting moment I thought I could go home and get the camera and come back for some closeup shots of the geese, but I saw the situation… There’s a flock of geese, and one individual goose off to the side with its head straight up… That one is the lookout, and I’ve learned from experience, what a wild goose chase is… That’s where you get too close to a flock and the lookout , wildly chases you around as you yell, “help! help!”
These photos were taken with my D7000, 18-200mm lens set to whatever focal length needed, F11 and 2000 ISO… So you say, ouch that’s a pretty high iso for outdoor photos, but not really, It was in the shade, that lens works really well at F11… but also given ducks are potentially moving targets, I wanted a pretty high shutter speed… So I set the camera to A mode, and turned the ISO up until I had at most 120’th of a second for speed. There was some minor grain in the photos that you could only see with magnification, but Light Room Classic’s new AI denoise works like a charm.
Apparently I have a habit of waking up at 4 am about once a week, checking my weather app and seeing it’s clear out — so I get my stuff together and take astro-photos. I enjoy that a lot, here is a nice pic of the moon:
Again woke up at 4am, as is my pattern now I check the weather app and it says “mostly clear” so, ok, why sleep. I can go out and at least line up the finder scope to the camera… All photos here were done without the tracker, on a tripod– 200mm focal length, and yeah… maybe this was dumb but the lens at F8…
Well there was a nice moon out and Jupiter and Saturn… sooo… I used my bahtinov mask to focus in on Jupiter (since it’s nice and bright) and snapped this pic of it… focus ok, over exposed Jupiter, but I get 3 moons:
Then, I get the focus and exposure better, but no moons (unless I push some sliders in lightroom)
Then I take a shot of Saturn… oh… it is pretty far away at 200mm it’s just a few pixels, but you can imagine it’s overall shape:
That’s greatly cropped, but if you click on it I hope you can see it 🙂
And now what you’ve been waiting for… here is a nice pretty well focused and exposed shot of the moon:
I told myself i would not get up in the wee hours of the night for photos — I really need sleep, my new plan was ok, just do solar stuff till we get into winter when it gets dark enough while I’m still awake…
A few weeks ago I decided to try my hand at selling stock photos on Adobe Stock. I have a Nikon D7000, and one thing I learned real quick was that though I can get nice close shots with my 18-200mm Nikon lens, the photos are not super sharp like you’d see with an actual macro lens.
So I purchased a Nikon Micro 40mm dx lens.. It’s one of Nikon’s suggested macro lenses for the D7000. This lens focuses real close, and though they say 40mm is on the short side for doing macro of things like insects that would get skittish with a lens getting close to them, I liked that it would also serve as an all around sharp lens.. And wow is it sharp. At least to my eyes.
The lens came when my camera body was in for factory service (I decided to get it all tuned up). And as soon as the camera came back I was out taking flower photos. Here is one I really like, a bee on a cone flower in our garden.
Now this is not a VR lens, so it takes a steady hand, good shutter speed, or a tripod. but that photo was one of the first ones I took with the lens and I did it hand held while the bee worked it’s way around the flower. I like the sharpness of the bee, but the depth of field is shallow, I like it that way, the only way to get it all in focus would be with a smaller F-stop, but hey.. the bee was moving too fast to experiment on the fly (pun intended).
Here are some more flower shots I did today. Again handheld and at like F8 or F11 and very fast shutter speed.
The reason I said wow in the title here is that as an all around lens it is also fantastic. I did a timer shot with the camera on a tripod, my wife standing exactly where I needed her, and I ran into the shot before the exposure. I’ll not post that photo here, but what I got was so hi-res that for the first time I need to consider processing to make portraits more flattering. In other words it captured everything about our faces in hi-def.. and so would actually need some softening.
All of these photos and our portrait photo were taken with autofocus, and they were all taken with the lens in infinity-.5feet mode, rather than full mode.
The bee photo was already approved by Adobe Stock and is available for purchase here. And a photo of just cone flowers is here.
I just uploaded today’s flower photos and unfortunately it will be some time before Adobe considers them due the the deluge of AI generated photos they are getting these days.
This blog entry looks like a product review, so I need to say, I have no material connection to Nikon, it just happens I bought their lens and like it so much I’m blogging about it.
Here is my Amazon affiliate link if you’d like to purchase the lens from Amazon, click the photo of the lens:
As I said in another post, I tried to photograph the Moon last night.. This was the best I could do.
I have no clue on how to focus on the moon. I have a Bahtinov mask, but that needs a bright star… it doesn’t work on the moon itself.
Don’t look too closely… It seems ok… zoom in… it’s a blur. Wow and I de-noised and sharpened the heck out of it. Oh and the best I could do was 200mm focal length. Which other web pages say is not long enough.
I have a D7000. I’ve taken thousands of shots with it, and have been basically happy. It’s only when I need to have sharp focus that I’ve been unhappy.
For one thing, I can’t manually focus the thing for beans. For another thing, seemingly it can’t auto-focus sharply for beans either. Well, at least with my 18-200mm lens.
I have spent hours playing with various ways to do AF fine tuning. Nothing really helped.
Until I read something. Last night I tried, but failed to get a sharp, manual, focus on the half moon. Couldn’t do it, and so I started searching around for info. Turns out the moon is pretty challenging to photograph, but one piece of advice stuck out. —-Remove the UV filter—- Gasp! Dare I?
So today I did it again… played around with AF Fine tune, failed, but then took the UV filter off, and turned off AF Fine tune… Uhm.. It worked.
Well I was able to take these shots, which you may not agree are in focus, but for me, they are in the best focus I’ve gotten for these subjects. Zoom to 100% and they look fine… zoom a little further, and still ok… So that makes me happy. I’m done with AF fine tune.
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