Friday night was a late night, I brought a couple friends to Bird Rock to do some more night shots after midnight.



The clouds cleared out after about 2am, giving us nice skies and even a moonbow in the water. The tide was a bit lower this time, so I was able to take some shots on the very rocky beach.



Focus is always an issue since there's nothing visible in the viewfinder. It just takes a bunch of shots at a high ISO to check focus, then fine tuning until you think you got it. Then deleting half the shots the next day when you see that they weren't quite in focus enough.



None of my shots came out quite as nice as my favorite one from last time, and I think part of that might be shooting at ISO 100 this time instead of 200 last time. That 1 stop difference means having to spend 10 minutes per shot instead of 5 minutes, and sometimes I'd close the shutter too soon in order to move on to the next composition. I thought that having a full moon would make up for that slight underexposure, but it turns out that it didn't. I could crank up the exposure during post processing, but that would add noise and contrast, defeating the purpose of doing long exposures. Better a little too dim than a little too noisy.



I will be making time for night shots about once a month, so if you want to join up with my slowly expanding group, just let me know.