I've never really done a lot of nighttime long-exposure work with digital because I thought it wasn't possible (too much noise, battery life, etc). However, when I was trying to shoot the Leonid meteor shower a few weeks ago I did some experimenting and found that it works pretty well. Shooting RAW, I can leave the "dark-frame subtraction" feature off and just let the Adobe RAW converter remove the bright/hot pixels for me automatically. That opens up a world of possibility (and shortens all that time you would otherwise have to wait for that 2nd exposure to be taken).
This past weekend I was out at a bonfire with family. At one point I went up to the top of the hill, set up the K10D, and locked it open. Then I went back to the bonfire and enjoyed their company for a while. Forgot about the camera actually.... then went back up and closed the shutter. 12.5 minutes later (oops! longer than planned), I have a slightly-overexposed photo of the sky (full moon that night) with the nice swirly circles going around Polaris. There was a small town just north of us, so that made the horizon kinda bright too. http://charles.robinsontwins.org/photos/2009/IMGP6866-2.jpg It's not much.. if I'd had more time to experiment I'm sure I could have done better. -Charles -- Charles Robinson - [email protected] Minneapolis, MN http://charles.robinsontwins.org http://www.facebook.com/charles.robinson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
