Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning

Early morning (5:30am Indonesia time) the sky was remarkably clear - here an aircraft was flying through the star field. I was shooting with my new 35 mm f/1.8 and decided to try a 30 sec exposure - ISO 1600 and I was surprise - pleasantly.

Morning stars that looks more like a double exposure - or more likely, I bumped the tripod midway through the exposure

No double exposure here

I thought the manual focus at infinity was not quite right so I adjusted it. The result: Orion out of focus - I suppose I was still sleeping

There was enough light to use autofocus here. About this photo - I used the Google Sky app for the Android phone (I have Nexus one) to orient my camera. I first got a satellite lock with the Nexus One GPS application - then switched to Google Sky. Buy aiming the phone at the horizon and then panning from left to right - I found the sun, just below the horizon. So I pointed my camera in this direction - and here is the result: almost perfectly centered. A view from afar (using 70mm - 300mm zoom - here at 70mm)

Here is a video of the Google Sky app on Nexus One (free) from youtube:

Close with the zoom at 300mm

Then sunrise happened

At 70mm

At 300mm

and later at 70mm

Fully risen at 300mm

And into the clouds

C. Frank Starmer

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