from tower to tower

Conversely, tall structures could offer an even better view — if you could climb them.

Here's the view from a 30-foot water tower:

These images are slightly overexposed because my battery was close to being completely drained at that time, and I couldn't make liberal use of live view for checking the exposure.

The last one had more accurate exposure, but I wish that I could have framed it better.

livewire

Previously, I had described trees, electric posts, and other structures as annoyances for blocking my view of the sky. However, that doesn't change the fact that some of them could be interesting subjects for photographs on their own.

Given that chlorophyll does a decent job of performing photosynthesis for most light frequencies (with green as the exception), I imagine that the plants pictured here never get a break.

On night photography

Notes:

1)

Factors previously considered for astrophotography:

• weather
• pollution levels (within or near cities)
• current phase of the moon (full, waning, new, waxing)

New lessons:

• Apparently, the current position of the moon in the night sky also affects the visibility of celestial bodies since the stars became less distinct as the moon rose higher.
• For high-resolution pictures, the movement of the sky becomes evident even at 15-second exposures. Upon closer inspection, the stars appear as very short dashes of light rather than dots.
• Turning the focusing ring on the lens all the way does not guarantee correct focus at infinity. I'm not sure if this is a matter of build quality, but with the two lenses I currently have (a zoom lens and a prime), turning the focus ring all the way will turn stars into blurred little balls of light rather than distinct points. Correcting this requires turning the focusing ring back by 1 or 2 degrees and verifying on the LCD if the focus is as sharp as possible. Most tutorials never mention this.
  
• Residential areas in cities here in the Philippines are generally not ideal for stargazing. Besides the typical buildings and houses, the sky is obstructed by power lines that run along every street. Also, we have these fucking huge trees growing everywhere.
  

2) For relatively close subjects, the EOS 600D's swiveling LCD screen may also be used for makeshift illumination when attempting manual focusing prior to taking a shot with flash. Simply switch to the brightest menu color and rotate the LCD screen such that it is facing forward. Visibility is still piss-poor, but definitely preferable to complete darkness.

Above is a shot of our house cat (tentative name: Roadkill) at 1AM. Despite the bright moon, this area remained dark since it was in the shadow of the house.


The critter nearly gave me a heart attack earlier when it climbed up the balcony to greet me. As if cats weren't stealthy enough by default, this one wears permanent night camouflage. The little bugger kept me company for the entire time I was outside and I had to keep her away from the tripod.


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Sidenote:
Blogger's default image uploader discards EXIF data. On the other hand, Imageshack retains EXIF information even after compressing the image, retaining image resolution while reducing file size.