A D600 Night at Knowlton church

I always feel like I need to start these posts with a: "So the weather is nice tonight" but I think I'll skip it this time by, instead, describing how I'm not going to do it...
Anyway, it was a clear night tonight so... damn it!

Tonight was to be my first truly clear night for a test-run with the D600 but as it turned out the moon rose the moment I arrived and washed the sky out. So no real milkyway on view but still, it was nice to get out for a change and let me try out the new D600 with a little more knowledge as to how it works. (Having read the manual.)

Here are the shots. I tried out some varying ISO speeds for noise comparison with my older D90 shots.

ISO 800

ISO 800

ISO 800

ISO 800

ISO 2000

ISO 3200

Not sure if there is much to learn from this exercise in retrospect to be honest. I shall try again on a darker night.

Supermoon and the Great Globe

Scouting a new location today with a bit of new equipment.
It's early in the evening with a full moon, (The Supermoon no less) so no real intention to get star photos but a genuine hope to find good spots for future shoots.

Now Durlston Head is part of a country park at the tip of the Purbecks tucked just behind Swanage. The key spots I wanted to see at Durlston head were:

1. Durlston Castle (I was not optimistic i'd get a good angle tbh)
2. The Great Globe (A large globe statue positioned below the castle)
3. Anvil Point Lighthouse
4. Tilly Whim caves (Again, I was not optimistic I could do much with them)

So a location with lots of potential. I did the trip with my brother, sister and her dog.

First up I had a stab at shooting the moon. (I'm still not terribly good at it and I was hoping to get a nice angle so as to frame a person silhouetted against it.

I cheated to get this. I moved the moon in post-processing.

Notice however how big the moon is, that's how big the supermoon is in reality through a 85mm lens(100% crop).

A lot of photos like the one used to head this article: link. Showed up during the supermoon event showing the moon being way, way more than the 14% bigger that it actually was, all of them were fakes.

Beautiful fakes but frustrating ones. It implies that things exist that can't and gives the impression that photographs are possible that aren't.

This is the supermoon through my longest zoom lens(200mm)

This is Fella, my sisters dog.

The Great Globe.

This stone monument is a great subject matter for future star-shoots. The fencing is a bit inconvenient but we'll see what I can do.

I will be back for this.

A Night at Lulworth Cove

This evening was spent at Lulworth Cove.
It was not intended to be a proper trip as it's a week-night but the weather was good and it needed to be taken advantage. I relaised I've nto really done much at Lulworth Cove itself. Often at places accessed via Lulworth Cove but not so much the place itself.

One thing I didn't know about Lulworth Cove is that to the right of the cove(West) there are large rock formations jutting out of the sea, so, immediately upon discovering this the first sequence of shots was determined and formed quite the distraction.

Due to the number of images and a couple of animated .gifs I've split this post up.
Please click below to read on...