Experiments with Night Photography

I used my GorillaPod to take this shot with a 30s exposure. I probably should have bumped the ISO up to 800, but I'm pretty paranoid about noise after some of what I've seen at 1600 and 3200. I also might not have thought of it at the time, I suppose.

I really wish I'd had a regular tripod with me; I've only done a very little night photography before, and it would have been really cool to be able to set up in a position in which I could actually get some light on Dawn. Of course, she still would probably have been pretty fuzzy - it's not easy to hold still enough for a photo for 30 seconds!

My SLR, a Canon 20D, only goes to 30 second exposures, unfortunately; that's just long enough for this photo to begin to show the movement of the stars. I hope to get one of these very cool remote shutter controllers because it lets you set exposures for a lot longer (just shy of 100 hours, though I doubt I'd ever want to do that, and I imagine you'd have to have the camera plugged into continuous power rather than using a battery). It would have been fun to do an hour-long exposure.

I also wish I'd taken a few more pictures. Dawn was cold, so I cut it short and went back inside with her, and this 15 second exposure really would have been better after 30 seconds.