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Subject: [Starry Night] amazing photographic discovery
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 05:58:14 -0400
From: Colin Holgate <colin@funnygarbage.com>

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Have you, like me, laughed at people who take flash photographs of an 
eclipse, or fireworks, or the Empire State Building? I won't laugh so 
readily from now on. Here's the story so far:

I recently posted a picture of the moon. I was fairly pleased with it 
(if you recall, it was taken with my digital camera pushed up against 
my binocular lens). Well, encouraged by this early success, I went 
back and tried again. I got nowhere near as good, you could barely 
tell it was the Moon at all. Then later I thought about what the 
difference was. The first time I tried it I had just put recharged 
batteries into the camera. Of course, how charged the batteries are 
don't affect the picture taking too much, but a byproduct of doing 
that is that the camera defaults are reset. One of those defaults is 
that the flash is turned on. My first picture taken in the first 
session did a flash, which I quickly rectified at the time.

What I realized later was that the one good photo I had taken might 
have been the mistake one taken with the flash, and the reason it 
would come out good was because the Moon is a bright thing, bright 
enough to cope with a short shutter speed that a digital camera with 
flash would take. I was keen to try out my theory.

Several cloudy days later, just now in fact, I was lying in bed 
asleep when a bright light woke me up. It was my friend the Moon. I 
was curious enough about this to get up, even though it was 5:20 am. 
I only took two photos, the first one wasn't so great, but I tried it 
again. Here's the photographic conditions for my second test:

I was lying on my back on my bed, with my left knee raised (there 
wasn't anyone else in the room, in case you're getting ahead of me 
here), my binoculars set to 20X balanced on my knee, my camera set to 
3X stuffed up against the eyepiece of the binoculars. I had this 
swaying mass of metal pointed out through my dirty windows, through 
the leaves of a big tree right outside my house, and tried to track 
that bright light.

Not the most perfect photographic setup, wouldn't you say? Take a 
look at the photo:


http://staging.funnygarbage.com/colin/amazingmoon.JPG


Now I'm really encouraged.

Back to bed.....