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Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/400, f/10, ISO 100, cropped and adjusted |
Earlier this month my wife and I took a trip to New Mexico. Amy was there to work, which left me with some time on my hands. Figuring I might not make it back to this part of the country again anytime soon, I picked a couple of destinations I’d been meaning to visit.
The first was the Very Large Array radio observatory, 50 miles west of Soccoro, New Mexico. I’ve loved astronomy ever since I was a kid, and though I don’t have the math skills to pursue it seriously, I still like to visit museums, observatories and the like. If you’re into this sort of thing, the VLA is definitely worth a trip. It’s refreshing to see a government operation that’s actually open and accessible to the public. The tour was excellent; the guide even sounded like
Carl Sagan. Just don’t trust Apple Maps to tell you where the turn is.
I lucked out in the timing department. The dishes were in their A configuration, which meant that they were as close together as they got. If they had been in the D configuration, they would have been more than 20 miles apart and not such an awesome photo op.
Even so, photographing them was a challenge. To convey a sense of the scene, the photo had to do two things: show all the dishes (or at least as many of them as possible) and convey just how big they were. Accomplishing one of the two tasks was easy. I used a wide angle lens to take the picture at the top of this post. It caught the whole array. But the scale is hard to read. Without something familiar for a scale reference, these could be no bigger than the dish currently serving as a weed arbor in my neighbor’s yard.
Getting in closer and adding some people to the composition helps establish the scale. But now you can’t see the array.
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Nikon D7000, 32mm (18-55), 1/1000, f/16, ISO 800 |
Of course I could always piece a pan shot together. This does the job if you can view it at full resolution. But shrunk down to a web-friendly size, it isn’t much better than the first picture.
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Nikon D7000, 50mm (18-55), 1/800, f/14, ISO 800, pan |
Here’s about as close as I could come to a good compromise:
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Nikon D7000, 36mm (18-55), 1/1000, f/16, ISO 800 |