Category: Photography

News and views about photography, cameras, social media, as well as pointers to Dave Bradley’s photographic output. You can also find me on Imaging Storm, Instagram and Flickr as “sciencebase”

Starring All Saints’ Church

A few snaps of All Saints’ Church, Cottenham, with the stellar backdrop of the Milky Way. In the third picture down, you can see the light trail of a satellite I spotted as I was framing up. Milky Way is perhaps most obvious in the last photo.

For those interested in such things, these were all shot with ISO set to 1600, a focal length of between 24 and 105mm and an f-stop of 4.0. Shutter speed was varied to accommodate the 500/fl rule, whereby you divide 500 by the focal length to obtain the maximum speed that will avoid star trails appearing as the Earth turns on its axis. At 24mm, a shutter speed above 20 seconds will clearly show star trails.

If some of these are not perfectly sharp or framed, blame my freezing hands, it’s minus F out there tonight…

How to photograph a meteor shower

My good friend Paul Sutherland alerted his Facebook cohort to the upcoming spectacle of the Geminid meteor shower. My immediate thought was what settings do I need to use with my camera having dabbled with astrophotography earlier this week. Thankfully, Suthers has me covered and saves me from having to write a full “HowTo”. Check out his guide to photographing a meteor shower here.

As with astrophotography, you will need a camera on a nice sturdy tripod. The camera must have the ability to control shutter speed and to have a time delay or a remote shutter control/cable release. It also needs to have a manual focus option.

So, what are we going to snap? The Geminids, that’s what. The Geminids are fragments of the object 3200 Phaethon which is probably a Palladian asteroid going around the sun in a “rock comet” orbit. Earth coincides with its path in December and those fragments that enter the atmosphere will burn up as “shooting stars”. Not due to friction but due to their high speed compressing the air in front of them and so heating it up to melting temperatures.

On a clear night, somewhere dark, away from streetlights etc, between December 4th and 17th (perhaps optimal will be 13th, 14th when they peak) point your camera on its tripod towards the constellation of Gemini. Use a wide angle. Live, manually focus on the stars. Set your ISO to between 800 and 1600. Widest aperture (smallest f-stop) possible and shutter speed based on the 500-rule to avoid capture motion of the stars due to Earth’s rotation. For a 20mm focal length, 500/20 = 25s maximum shutter speed.

At their peak, there will be a couple of shooting stars every minute from 10 pm onwards. Keep your eyes peeled, Once you’ve seen a few, you should be able to figure out their point of origin in that part of the sky in which the constellation Gemini lies. Adjust the angle and direction of your camera to capture the shooting star trails emanating from this point.

If you have a DSLR, there will likely be a cable release. If there’s an automated one you could set the camera up to fire a couple of times a minute all night and go to bed. It’ll keep shooting until the battery charge runs out. Some cameras will have Wi-Fi and an app that lets you control the camera via the internet and thus your smartphone, tablet, or PC. I’m just investigating as to whether the app for my Canon 6D lets one set up a scheduled regular shutter release so I can get a good night’s sleep while the camera does the work of watching the meteor shower.

NB Protect your camera from condensation and the weather outside and when you bring it back indoors.

Photographing the stars

I blogged and posted photos of starscapes I shot last on a chilly November night this week at about 11 pm. Here’s the executive summary for getting a sharp photo without star trails caused by Earth’s rotation. It was a clear night, but there was a quarter moon so not perfect conditions, best to shoot after moonset or when there’s a new moon. Also, make sure minimal domestic lighting on and away from streetlights. (Protect your camera from cold and damp if you’re outside for a long time and from condensation when you bring it back indoors).

Fix wide angle lens, e.g. 20mm-105mm or prime, to the camera.

Mount camera on a sturdy tripod, pointing up at the stars of interest. Milky Way, a constellation etc.

Set camera’s white balance to tungsten.

Open up the aperture as wide as it will go – lowest f-stop for the lens and camera. f.4.0 was what my Canon lens could manage at 20mm.

Set ISO to about 1600, but lower it, if you get a lot of purple speckly noise.

Make the shutter speed no slower than 500/focal length, for 20mm that would be 25 seconds. That avoids star trails. If brightest stars look too blown out, shorten the shutter time.

Manually focus.

Set a shutter time delay or use a cable release or app to take the shot.

If you can find somewhere dramatic, like a mountain range, all the better. I made do with the roofline of our houses as a context to the sky.

Thanks to Practical Photography magazine for initial stellar inspiration.

Stellar photography shoots for the stars

We’ve all seen those amazing shots of the Milky Way with some stunning vista, an enormous bridge, mountains, a rainforest…well, there’s not a lot of that around here but I fancied shooting the stars.

Basic things: you need a tripod, a remote shutter control or the ability to set a shutter release timer, and a fully manual camera with manual focus. It’s best to dial in the settings indoors before you step out into a chilly November night. Also, it’s best to choose a moon-free night and to be somewhere with low light pollution. Easier said than done, of course.

Anyway, set the white balance on the camera to tungsten for best results. Choose an ISO of about 1600 and an f-stop (aperture) as low as it will go (bigger aperture in other words). With my 24-105mm on my Canon 6D I could stop it down to f/4.

Now, here’s the science bit. Because you’re going to need a long exposure, several seconds to get a good exposure, the earth will have rotated a little bit during the exposure and the stars will look like short light trails. Now, you could make this a feature of your photo. Aim at the pole star and set a really long exposure and you will get those fancy circular trails. But if you want nice starry pinpoints, you need to use a rule of thumb to avoid light trails. The rule of thumb is to divide 500 by the focal length you’re using and that’s the maximum number of seconds you can expose before star trails will become apparent. I was planning to shoot at 24 mm focal length, so 20 seconds or less would be about right (as it turned out 15 seconds was best with the f-stop and ISO I’d set.

Set your camera up on the tripod, align it with a patch of sky you wish to photograph and manually focus to get the stars looking as sharp as you can (You might have to zoom in and focus unless there’s a particularly bright star in your patch of sky and then zoom out again without changing the focus). Set the camera to timer mode (10s works best rather than 2s, to let the camera settle after pressing the shutter release) or use a shutter cable or wireless remote.

Post-processing can boost a photo. Here’s one I took at the local church with a heavenly backdrop that reveals more of the stars

And, this one is a shot of the Orion Nebula.

From Ayer’s Rock to Uluru

As of the time of writing, November 2017, it’s almost 28 years to the day that Mrs Sciencebase and myself (although we weren’t Mr&Mrs at the time and Sciencebase didn’t exist) backpacked our way around Australia. Greyhounding from Melbourne to Adelaide, North through Coober Pedy to the Red Centre, Alice and Uluru, onward to

the Top End via Kakadu to Darwin, then back across to Townsville up to Cairns, Magnetic Island, and the Great Barrier Reef and back down the East Coast through Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra, and back to Melbourne.

The sacred site of Uluru was an important pilgrimage and at the time, the site told you it was hazardous to climb and that dogs, bikes, and camping were not allowed. Although the Anangu people had been encouraging visitors not to climb for a couple of years in 1989, they had not banned the climb and we were told that the Anangu got a percentage of the takings from backpackers and tourists visiting. Looking back, that’s probably unlikely given how the people of Australia have been treated historically.

As of 2019, climbing the sacred site will be banned. UPDATE: The last climbers took to the chain on 25th October 2019.

Wedding anniversary celebrations island hopping along the Dalmation Coast of Croatia

Mr and Mrs Sciencebase have been celebrating their wedding anniversary in Croatia, hence the recent radio silence, we were also laid low on our return by an incubating aviation-acquired viral infection. Anyway, a quick snap of one of the beautiful cities we visited along Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, Pucišca on the island of Brac with its locally excavated limestone buildings and many “snowy” (as well as the more familiar Croatian terracotta) rooves.

Early morning, I hopped off our little, 16-berth boat to get some golden hour shots of the town (day before it had poured with rain), and almost didn’t make it back aboard, despite the captain assuring me I had “ten minutes, no worries”, I’d been gone perhaps three when I saw them starting to raise the gangplank, as it were.

Anyway, I got back on and was reunited with my bride and our many new friends and island hoppers aboard from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, UK, and USA on our journey from Dubrovnik to Korcula, to the aforementioned Pucišca, Omiš, Bol (on the other side of Brac), Hvar, Mljet (with its national park) and back to Dubrovnik.

The public gallery of my photos is on Flickr, but you might also like to friend or follow me on Facebook for updates if you’re interested in Croatia, Dalmatia, Dubrovnik (and its Game of Thrones connection) and more…

Fox on the run

Headed out before sunset today to see if we could spot the barn owl hunting again…no luck. Lots of linnets, wood pigeons, long-tailed tits and not much else. However, the sun had gone down and we were almost back to the main road when we spotted a (juvenile?) fox pouncing on insects in the recently mown hayfield adjacent to the road. It was almost dark, hence the noisy photos (really high ISO). The fox never seemed aware of our presence although we were no more than 100 metres away from it. There was no wind and we were partially shield by the broken hedgerow. Eventually, it ran to earth when it saw a tractor steaming up Rampton Road with lights whirring and beams on…

Departing are such sweet swallows

In some parts of the UK, the migrants have already departed, but there are plenty of swifts, house martins, sand martins, and barn swallows here in East Anglia, from the North Norfolk coast, to deepest Norfolk and west again to Cambridge (well those are the places I’ve seen them this week).

Back in early May, I photographed adult (barn) swallows (Hirundo rustica) getting it on at Bottisham Lock on the River Cam near Waterbeach (north of the city of Cambridge). The adults are still whirling around the skies and scooping up water and insects from the river. These two products of that springtime behaviour were anything but shy when I turned the camera on them.

On a sultry late August afternoon, they seemed to be relaxing, totally oblivious to the fact that in a few days time they will be flying some 300 kilometres a day south. They will cross the perilous Sahara Desert on an approximately 9500 km journey to their winter abode in South Africa. They’re less than four months old and it will take them a month or so to make that journey. And, early next March/April those that survive the journey and the South African summer will head north again to start the cycle once more.

Incidentally, it was not just before Christmas 1912 that we knew for certain that barn swallows seen in the English summer were migrating all the way to South Africa. A bird ringed in the summer by James Masefield in Staffordshire was identified in Natal on 23rd December that year.

Oh, and in case you missed it on Facebook back in May…here’s the earlier activity

Felt inspired by these gorgeous creatures to put together a sultry instrumental on a late summer’s day.

NWT Barton Broad

Heading home from a camping trip in North Norfolk, we had vague plans to visit an RSPB reserve in the area but sidled up to the second largest of the broads, Barton Broad in Barton Turf. The broad was apparently only accessible by boat until 2003 (when a boardwalk was piled and constructed to get you to a viewing platform) and is alleged to have been a splashing ground of local boy Horatio Nelson. It was acquired by Norfolk Wildlife Trust in 1945.

From the viewing platform in late August 2017, cormorants winging it on pontoons, lots of great crested grebes and a few gulls, roach with their red fins in the water, but more intriguing a couple of swallowtail caterpillars on the milk parsley readying themselves for pupation at the foot of the reeds where they will overwinter and emerge next Spring.

Also sighted a couple of reed warblers and various dragonflies, and an orange flower that seemed quite whitespread in the darkest recesses of the area surrounded by the Herons’ Carr Boardwalk, Facebook friends identified it as an invasive species, orange jewelweed (Impatiens capensis).

Earlier in the trip sandmartins and lots of cormorants on the North Norfolk coast, at least one meadow pipit with a mouthful of crickets and dragonflies and an exotic-looking sycamore moth caterpillar in the less exotic Mundesley car park, oh, and a somewhat exotic alpaca farm (all females, apparently).

You can check out various other arty farty fotos from our most recent trip to Norfolk on my Flickr page.