This past weekend Barb L. and I attended a community dinner for the area where I grew up. It has been over 35 years since I lived there so I didn’t know a lot of the people. But it was nice to see the ones I did know and catch up a little with them.
After leaving we stopped by the Boomershoot site to shoot a few tracers. It was way past dark but with a nearly full moon and the ground was covered with snow. Both the scenery and the tracers were really pretty.
After shooting the tracers we went for a walk on top of the hill where the 700 yard targets are placed. There is a great view from there. I took a bunch of pictures but they just didn’t capture what we experienced. “It’s magical!”, is how Barb described it. I’m not sure magical is quite right. Perhaps surreal.
Here are a few of the better, but still poor, pictures.
Ooohhhh.. Tracers by moonlight over the snow -sounds BEEEE-utiful!
The human eye is amazing – taking pictures of what our eye can discern is very hard at times, even with the best equipment. Low-light really needs a tripod. I’ve yet to take any really good ones in moonlight, but like your just ones that sort of hint at what was seen at the scene.
I was using a tripod but there was still some shake.
Remote release (or timer), or normal “push the botton?” on a 30-second exposure it shouldn’t make a big diff, just a slight softening. Of course, perfect focus in low light is also a problem, so going wide to maximize depth of field is good. Of course, a LOT of lenses get pretty soft wide open, though modern ones are much better. Still decent enough pics to get the idea across.
Normal “push the button”. I know. I should have used the timer. But I would have had to take the time to figure it out in the near dark. Barb L. has a surface area to mass ratio approaching infinity which means she gets cold from the breeze off a butterfly’s wings at 10 paces. Hence I didn’t want to take the extra time.