David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of nature and the natural world. Plants, animals, and wildlife from around the world.
More firefly trails. I found that I can do exposures longer than 30 seconds on the Fuji X-H1 camera. However, at the cost of more sensor noise. The image required more post processing to remove the red and blue noise pixels.
More firefly trails shot from my backdoor. It was a bit warmer out. With the Nikon D5 and 200 mm f/2 lens I moved the focus a bit closer to the camera so the flashes at a distance had more Bokah.
The last few nights were not good for firefly viewing due to rain and cool temperatures. I took a chance with three cameras last night and it didn’t rain. The brown in the second image is where the “mile-a-minute” invasive vine is being eliminated.
I was part of a team of six photographers that took ~30,000 images as the MV Explorer (Semester at Sea Spring 2013 Enrichment Voyage) transits the Kiel Canal in Germany.Howard Ignatius used the images to create this time-lapse video of the passage through the canal.
Late night or early in the morning (hard to tell this far north when there isn’t much darkness at night) I looked out my cabin window on the MV Explorer and saw the electric blue Noctilucent clouds. I read about them before (http://www.spaceweather.com/), but had never seen them. The clouds are ice crystals that are very high that you can only see for a short time when the sun is below the horizon. One theory is the crystals are nucleated when micro-meteors pass through the upper atmosphere. We were in the Baltic Sea traveling from Stockholm to Copenhagen and the sun doesn’t set until very late I set up a camera in my cabin and started taking pictures.(Nikon D4 camera, 28 mm f/1.8 lens (ISO 200 or 800, 28 mm, f/1.8, 1 sec)). The composite images were generated using Photoshop CC (statistics, maximum) the way I do generate star trails. I was impressed that you can see the star trails looking north, even though this is a composite of images taken on a moving ship at sea. The seas were pretty calm that night (early morning).
