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.

Knowlton Church 2

I did a revisit at Knowlton Church last night as I spotted some clear weather and felt I had to take advantage.
Just  quick couple of shots but I'm happy with how they came out. Again I took a series of photos that I can work into a animation at a later date.

Knowlton Church

Tonight I did a quick run to Knowlton Church.
An old ruined church situated in the middle of a barrow henge.

The decision to go out was very last minute as the sky just happened to seem very clear and I'd noticed the next weeks worth of whether was going to be very poor. The site is quite local to me relative to some of the other locations I've been visiting lately so I didn't feel like I was risking much by just having a look.

As it turned out there was a very bright and almost full moon in the southern sky which, while interesting to see how much of an effect it has on the sky, was a bit inconvenient as that's precisely the direction I wanted to face and completely blots out that whole area of sky.

What it does do however is nicely illuminate the subject of the photography. These photographs were shot in the dead of night at 23:00-02:00.
With exposure lengths of thirty seconds the moon-light appears to do as good a job as the sun in lighting up the area.