I dropped the kids off at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s last week and decided to scout the grounds of the Stone Quarry Art Park for possible night photography. Perhaps, I thought, I could frame a piece of art a composition with the Milky way.
I quickly discovered that it wasn’t going to work. Most of the installations are surrounded by trees and the only art installation that was afforded a view of the south sky was Tree3, which has severely degraded from it’s original form 8 years ago and is not worthy of including in an image in 2020.
Looking north, however, there is a piece (“Eye of Heaven“) that might provide an opportunity for a long exposure of the night sky with star trails with the curves of the art piece intersecting with the stars like a Venn-diagram. I plan to keep my eyes open for an opportunity in the night sky on a weekend. Unlike the Milky Way, the north star will always be in the same place, so I can capture the same image any evening from May through October, when the conditions are right.
After the art park, I still had some time to spend on my own before I was expecting to return home, so I walked to some public land that my father had told me about that was another mile south. It turned out to be a trail that went along the Nelson Swamp; it was a 1-mile down-and-back trail that went through a mostly wooded area, but crossed Chittenango Creek as it passes through the marshy land. The light was mostly flat and there wasn’t anything that caught my eye, so I played around a little bit with ICM.
I am still experimenting with how to use ICM in a manner that I find most interesting and in a manner (wide angle landscape, tele for details, or both?) that I can deliver more consistent results and pre-visualize what I am looking for. I want to arrive to the point where my results are less the result of luck and circumstance. I am hoping to begin to “see” what images might look like before I take the picture, but I need to better understand how much movement I need and at what shutter-speeds and what focal length for best success.