A Frozen Finger Night Time Driveway Photo Excursion

So about Six PM this evening it was already pretty dark. It was clear all day, and I had been wanting to get out and try to do some more night time sky photography. It was cold already, funny how that happens when the clouds go away it gets really cold, even though we are still running above normal temperatures for the winter. I wanted to get out side and get my shots before it got to cold, as it was it was already pretty dang cold at 17F which is about minus 8C. Cold, my fingers got really cold. Still there were colder places today, and we have not had to suffer more than 1 day so far below zero temperature, so I am glad about that.

Prior to going out I used the HYPERFOCAL method of focusing my camera that a fellow steemian directed me to. I think I got a bit better focus this time around. The Stars looked pretty good. I still need to work on what ISO setting are going to do the job with my camera with out picking up to much digital noise. I am closing in on that. There are trade off's and I guess each Camera even if the same brand and same make and even the same lens, where you are at and where you are using it does make a little bit of difference.

Tonight's shots started with some 3200 ISO settings, but I did step down to 2000 ISO. Other than getting some things in a shot I had to edit out, the 3200 was not to bad, it gave the deep deep dark blue of early night, and got some stars with minimal edit adjusting. I still like the 2500 ISO setting though, and kind of on the fence with 2000 ISO for the pictures. I'll add the picture settings under the photos, and of course the big view link will give you the full image.

Pretty much right out the door of the house. The light from the kitchen window lighted the tree a little bit and I wanted to bring that out more so a-editing I went.
f/4.5 10 sec, ISO-3200 Big View

I like the deep blue that is low on the horizon, this was the second picture.
f/4.5 10 sec, ISO-3200 Big View

This was with the camera tilted way back and looking almost straight up
f/4.5 10 sec, ISO-3200 Big View

The Big Dipper, right over the group of trees in the driveway that we drive around. Yeah even though it was cold I had to get that shot when I saw it.
f/4.5, 20 Sec, ISO-2000 Big View

One of the things I am working on is learning how to stack photos. It was pretty cold out side as I mentioned but I did manage to get a series of three shots to stack and to try and further my abilities with playing with photos. The first of the three was done at 20 seconds, the second at 25 seconds and the third was done at 30 seconds. I used the additive function when layering the images with a transparency of 175.
Big View

Here is the last shot in the series the one that was done for 30 seconds.
f4.5, 30 Sec, ISO-2000. Big View

All in all I did not freeze myself for nearly as long as I thought I did, what seemed like at least a half an hour was really only from 6:08 Pm til 6:17 PM. Nine minutes, but it was dang cold, and I am glad that I had my spikes on my shoes, there is still a lot of ice on the driveway, soon to be covered with the Saturday/Sunday snows.

It is a shame I did not tough it out and get at least 10 shots for the series, 50 would have been a great number to try stacking, although I am not sure my battery would hold up for that long of a time.

I do need to find a better laptop or figure out the image offloading and storage issue of my photos. Still being pretty new to digital photography it is hard to just Delete, I mean I might want to play with the photo in an editor or use it in the distant future as a so here is where I screwed this one up examples. I do love when the little camera chips go on sale, and need to find another sale, I don't delete off the chips anymore, so when it is full it gets removed and safely tucked away in a drawer, most likely to never see the light of day again, but there is always that thought, that need to see that picture one more time. Of course it does not help that I use the RAW/NEF and JPG shooting option so I always have two images one NEF and one JPG. I don't know why I still have the JPG option turned on other than my old desktop software does not recognize the RAW/NEF file versions, (not that I off load to my desktop anymore just because of that reason, and of coarse I filled my hard drive up pretty quick with picture that I then had to go buy an external USB 1 TB HDD drive). So saving pictures, let alone trying to organize them for me is a frozen tundra nightmare.

I know I'm kind of rambling on, like I mentioned, my laptop was getting full, so I started to move my picture folder over to the HDD, I should have moved the pictures I wanted to post over to my desk top so I could at least get the final edits and get them uploaded, and placed where I want in the post, but...nope...did not think of doing that at the time I started the transfer, I did think it a few minutes after I started, but by then it was to late, and I did not want to interrupt the file transfer because of the possibility of file corruption. yes and it finally finished up, so I have half of my hard drive space back on the laptop. Now to shut down the laptop, make sure the files are fully written, then unplug the HDD from it and plug it into the desktop, so back to working on the post instead of wait rambling.

Comments, Suggestion, Ideas always welcome, and of course hints tricks tips, and so on.

Sorry for the edit, I put my bar separator above the first picture, and I hate doing that, so replaced it with two <hr>'s