A little tree with yellow leaves along the banks of a running brook.

Tall trees in the mist

The sun backlit the trees and made it seem like a dream. The light made the trees seem more alive. Slender shapes more real. The glow against the bark more majestic.

A Surprisingly Beautiful Day in Vermont

Skies were gray. Rain fell. But a mist shrouded the trees and made it very inviting to photograph everything around me today.

Horses are such beautiful creatures. But like most animals, they tend to get on with their daily lives without so much as a hint they we are nearby, watching, admiring. A group of horses was eating some grasses on a hillside. A storm was approaching. We were watching from afar and they took no notice of us while busily feeding. That doesn’t make much of an interesting photograph, i.e. horses eating. However, we made some “horsey” noises, as my wife called them and we got one to look back at us and take notice. That was when I pressed the shutter.

So, horses eating grass = not so interesting. Horse looking back at you into the camera with some dark and moody skies in the background = interesting photo.

Don’t worry, no horses were harmed nor harassed while taking this photo. If anything, the horses may have been amused by the sounds we made, thinking, “weirdos”.

Milky Way and Cloud

Some passing clouds were illuminated by the light pollution of the nearby town. I caught this one sort of cradling the Milky Way. 

Again, single exposure, 15sec. at f/3.5 and 18mm. Anyone with a decent DSLR and some dark skies can do this. Just pick your widest angle lens, shoot wide-open for aperture, and experiment with the exposure time from 10 to 30 seconds. Longer will get you more stars but you will also pick up the movement of the stars and they will start to show as streaks rather than points of light. Also increase your ISO and experiment. Higher will get you more stars but that also means more noise and more to work with afterwards when you post-process the photo. I believe I took this one at ISO 3200. Oh, and to get a more pleasing color tone, set your white balance either to Tungsten or if you can do a custom white balance, set it around 3000K or so and experiment. Shoot RAW if you can!

The Milky Way

In an effort to try something new, which I have always been fascinated with, I decided to take a stab at taking some photos of the stars and perhaps capture our galaxy, the Milky Way. I was surprised to find that I could see the Milky Way with the naked eye, here on the East Coast, in NJ. I was also surprised at how easy and fun it was to capture this with a camera. 

So this is just a single exposure, 15sec. f/3.5 at 18mm. Amazing.

Lily Pad

Lily Pad Scaffolding

Grasses