The latest photographical mistake I've made was during a chilly dark winter's night as I attempted to take some star trail photographs. I spent time at home working out how to set my camera up correctly and decided on using manual focus because at night the auto-focus is unable to focus on anything. I read numerous articles on the process and was glad to find this article which explains how you can take lots of 30 second exposures and then combine them rather than waiting an hour and then realising your (my) mistake.
And so to the mistake. I set up my tripod and camera pointing to the piece of sky with the most stars. Took numerous 30 second exposures and reviewed several of the images on the camera LCD although you can see bugger all at night even with my kinetic torch (christmas present from the family). When I got home I eagerly loaded my photos onto my PC and wondered what all the fuzzy blobs were.
Focusing manually to infinity requires you to turn the focusing ring all the way to one extreme - unfortunately I picked the wrong extreme and therefore everything was out of focus.
Oh no! That's so frustrating. It's definitely good to learn by your mistakes because you'll never forget this in future but it feels awful to miss out on the photo opportunities.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link John.. I have to say that I've done the same thing. After an hour and a half of standing around in the dark its not funny at all to find out you wasted your time!. Good luck on the next one!
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