You know what happened a couple of nights ago? A really nice con­stel­la­tion of Moon and chapel of Saint Patrick’s Col­lege could be seen right from our bal­cony, includ­ing a nice cloud which added to the mood. Unforun­ately I left my own cam­era over in the office that day, so I had to dig out Steff’s 7 year old Nikon Coolpix 5700 to cap­ture the scene.

But any­way, hav­ing the cam­era res­ted on the bal­cony table, and snap­ping off a few 8 second expos­ures, I had to smile a bit when our neigh­bours had the same idea: Unfor­tu­nately, they were try­ing to use their flashes to get the pic­ture right… This made no sense, as 1) any on-​camera flash is so weak that it usu­ally never reaches more than a few meters (and the trees and tower were a couple of hun­dred meters, and the moon a couple of hun­dreds of thou­sands of kilo­met­ers away). Thus, all they were doing was 2) wast­ing their cam­era bat­ter­ies and 3) redu­cing the con­trast in the pic­ture (as the flash would have lit the slight mist in the air and thus just make the blacks look “milky”).

What you need to do in such extremely dark con­di­tions would be first of all turn off your flash. Then, make sure you rest your cam­era on some­thing (a tri­pod would obvi­ously be the easi­est solu­tion) and use the self-​timer to take the shot (as press­ing the shut­ter your­self would shake the cam­era and your pic­ture will loose crisp­ness).

So as I was say­ing in the last post, it’s not the most expens­ive cam­era that takes the pho­tos, but the pho­to­grapher with his exper­i­ence and taste.