The moon over Sai Kung. Please do take a moment to look at the photo large size to see the detail. Because I’ll tell you, when I loaded this into Lightroom and took a look at it, I was pretty damned happy.
Technical details? Nikon D800 of course. The longest lens I own is the Nikon 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 and that’s what I used, zoomed all the way to 300mm. I went for ISO 100, F8.0 aperture and took a guess at the shutter speed and went with 1/160th of a second. Manual focus. Mirror lock-up mode. I took a few shots (the moon kept getting covered by clouds) and when I looked at this one and magnified it, I knew I was done for the night.
To give you an idea of just how much of a crop that is, here’s the uncropped shot:
(In terms of post production, aside from cropping, all I did was bump up the exposure 1/4 stop and tiny bumps on the Highlights and Clarity sliders. No additional sharpening.)
Now, to give you an idea of what a HUGE difference the manual focus + image magnification in LiveView makes, you might recall a shot I tried on my first night with the camera. Here’s tonight’s version, just slightly cropped:
This is the same 70-300mm lens, zoomed out to 82mm, 100 ISO, F8, 10 seconds. Here’s a detail from the above shot.
Noticeably sharper. And now here it is with a smidge of sharpening and a bit of noise reduction, just for the hell of it:
One last pair of shots. This is a village about a mile or more away from me, nestled on a mountain side, I see its lights every night. (I think this is Pik Uk Village.)
125mm, ISO 100, F8, 10 seconds. I had a difficult time framing this (I hate the tripod head I’ve got at the moment) and the only thing I could see to focus on, even with the magnification, was the lights in the village so I was basically. Here’s a crop from the above:
Not too shabby.
Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m going to be having dinner at Cucina in Tsim Sha Tsui. If you know this restaurant, you know it is right next to an outdoor deck facing out onto HK harbor. So weather permitting (and if I don’t drink too much!) I plan to set up the tripod there and take harbor shots after dinner. You might say this is what I’ve been getting ready for.
3 Comments
Happy birthday! Thanks for that magnificent moon photo – very, very nice.
These look great! Happy bithday.
ps. Do you hear any zeiss lens calling…….100 macro…….
pps Lensrentals.com have a blog and they did some imatest measurements on most of the zeiss and nikon range, its very interesting to see, the post is down the page on approx Apr 10th
Thanks Dave. Sure I hear Zeiss lenses calling all the time but my wallet is definitely thin these days. I saw about that lensrentals post and have tagged it to look at later.