Stars

Nikon D7000, 10.5mm, 30 sec., f/2.8, ISO 800

The whole time we were in New Mexico, I kept hoping for the chance to photograph the night sky. We were staying in Dixon, a small town far enough from city lights to allow me to get a good shot of some stars.

So naturally it was monsoon season. Every single day the sky clouded up late in the afternoon and stayed overcast until well after I’d gone to bed.

But on our second-to-last night there, I finally got some luck. The skies cleared almost entirely (you can still see some clouds toward the bottom of the shot) and I finally got the shot I was after.

I set up a tripod in the courtyard of the mission where we were staying and took the picture with a wide angle lens. So you can see roofs, trees, a pole and some power lines. The light in the window in the lower left-hand side is from my wife’s phone. A 30 second exposure will pick up just about any available light.

Mesa Verde

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/250, f/6.3, ISO 100

While in New Mexico I took a side trip up to Colorado. I have fond memories of a childhood visit to Mesa Verde, so I thought I’d drive up for the day. If nothing else, I figured I’d find some good photo opportunities.

Which I did. The best part of the trip was the hike to Petroglyph Point. Just a little way up the trail the crowd thinned out considerably, and by the time I reached the carvings I was virtually alone. What fun it was to use one of the world’s newest communication methods to record one of the oldest.

The trail started and ended at the Spruce Tree House cliff dwellings. The crowd was much thicker there, but from the right angles it was possible to get shots without too many tourists in them.

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/100, f/5.0, ISO 100

I even managed to shoot a short panorama.

Nikon D7000, 35mm (18-55), 1/160, f/6.3, ISO 100, panorama

VLA

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.

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.

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:

Nikon D7000, 36mm (18-55), 1/1000, f/16, ISO 800

Lens – Nikon 18-55mm

This is my original kit lens, and not just because I got it in a bundle with my D3000. It’s a great example of a lens with a middle-of-the-road focal length range and reliable quality. Thus it’s perfect for many different tasks. Though I don’t use it as much as I used to, it still works well when a shoot is likely to require adapting to a variety of conditions and I plan to concentrate more on my subjects than on my equipment. Note: the photo shows the lens with a third party lens hood attached.

Lenses – Nikon 10.5mm

For the next few weeks I’m going to blog about the lenses in my collection.

When I first got serious about photography, I entered the pursuit with three lenses: one that came with the camera and two I inherited from my grandma.

Since then my collection has expanded a bit. However, I try not to over-buy on lenses. Whenever I’m tempted to buy a new toy, I ask myself if it will really add anything to my ability to take pictures. Because I already have a solid range of focal length options, I rarely need to add anything new.

Though I keep a more “standard” lens on my workhorse camera, this lens is frequently on my second. I didn’t set out to like fisheye photography. Indeed, just the opposite. Normally I like my photos to look undistorted, as close as possible to what my eye actually saw. But I took a chance on an inexpensive fisheye glass for my Lensbaby, got hooked on wide angle and later splurged for this considerably more expensive lens. The distortion still kinda bothers me, but I love the wider views (especially for landscapes).

One day recently I took all my lenses down to Liberty Memorial. With my camera mounted on a tripod (to keep the results consistent), I shot pictures with each lens to demonstrate the effects of their focal lengths. Prime lenses like this one have only one photo, while zoom lenses have two or more photos to illustrate their full ranges.

Canon EOS 10D

When I first waded into the digital photography waters for real, this is the camera that helped me learn to swim. The college where I work purchased it for the students on the newspaper staff, and I practiced with it when the students weren’t using it.

Though it’s a fine camera, I don’t do much with it anymore. It’s a bit outdated, and some newspaper staffers didn’t take good care of it. Quick aside to my current students: this is why you don’t get “loaner” cameras from the college while you’re in photography classes.

You may find this camera in captions here and there, but most of the pictures in this blog were taken with one of the Nikons.

Nikon D7000

Until I bought the D810, this was my “workhorse” camera. Because of its ease of use, it’s currently doing duty as my classroom exercise camera at work.

Though it’s a crop sensor, it produces good quality images and includes several features I really love. One of the biggest draws is that it has control wheels in front and back, which allow a user in manual mode to easily change shutter speed and aperture. I also work a little easier knowing that it has slots for two memory cards, making it highly unlikely that I’ll run out of storage space (even shooting in RAW format).

The only two reasons I might not recommend this camera to a beginner are the wealth of options (the settings menus can get downright confusing even to someone with experience) and the price (right around $1000 when I bought it new, camera only, from Wolfe Camera in Topeka).