Photo Field Trip, RMNP. (Click to see a larger image.)

You don’t have to put your camera away just because the sun sets and the stars come out. Stay outside and have fun. Put your camera on a tripod (if it isn’t already), set your shutter on B (for bulb) and take long exposures of the night sky. Be sure to include some of the landscape.

These are photographers at my Rocky Mountain National Park photography workshop. Many of them had never gone this deeply into night photography. I kept hearing “oh wow” and “come look at this” as images popped up on the camera LCD screens and the photographers shared photos with each other (and with me). We had a great time. Next year’s workshop will be September 25-27, 2015.

To keep the stars from streaking across the sky I used ISO 800 which gave me a shutter speed of 10 seconds in the fading light at dusk. With a 24 mm focal length you can take a photo at long as 20-25 seconds without a lot of star movement. The Big Dipper (Ursa Major) is just to the right of center.

Photo Field Trip, RMNP, cropped from the original image.

This is from the bottom left corner of the original photo. There are two photographers in this part of the image with two different types of tripods. The one to the left has a red headlamp and the one to the right has a white headlamp. During the 10 second exposure the photographer on the right creates an image, looks at it on the back of his camera, then takes the camera and lens off the tripod and holds it in the light of his headlamp.

Photos from earlier in the evening are in the two prior posts.

Photo Data: Canon 5D Mark III. Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens at 24 mm. 10.0 sec,  f/4.0,  ISO 800.

Link

Photography workshop in Rocky Mountain National Park