3650 Seconds and 757 Seconds

As is often my wont, I did something crazy the other night. I ran away to the mountains! I have been wanting to try some more moonlight photography and I had a day I was able to take off work so I figured I would give it a shot.

There is a mountain by a lake (Bald Mountain & Mirror Lake) that I used to visit a lot when I was a kid. I have long wanted to capture on film the feeling of sneaking down to the lake in the middle of the night to look at the stars and the mountain reflecting in the lake by the light of the moon.

This is my first attempt at this, I didn't choose the correct phase of the moon/time of night it rises to capture the mountain like I wanted to. However I did get a fun shot of the mountains to the north of the lake with the moon illuminating them.

So here is an exposure of 3650 seconds (Just over an hour), Pentax K200D, Sigma 10-20 f4-5.6 lens at 10mm. ISO 100, f5.6, wired locking shutter release on a tripod (duh!).

There are some falls off of the road back to town, with some trails along the side where you can get some decent vantage points. I thought it would be fun to play there and see what I could get. The moon was not shining on the falls so I had to use my LED headlamp and LED MagLight to light things up while the shutter was open. The only difference from the previous shot was the duration of the exposure. 757 seconds.

As an aside, shooting shots like this is technically very difficult. It helps to get there BEFORE sunset when there is light to compose the shot. Then wait for dark. I would certainly have made a different composition to the waterfall had I the opportunity to survey the area more. Trying to compose a shot while waving a flashlight around and looking through the viewfinder and trying to lock down the tripod head is hard.... REALLY hard!