20120605

Venusian trip



You might have heard that Venus is making a transit across the face of the sun today. We lost it pretty early, where I am, as the sun set well before the transit finished. But we lost the sun for pictures much earlier than that, even, as we had near-complete cloud cover.

This is the best shot I've got. As you can tell by the fact that this is a 100% crop from the camera's JPEG (I usually shoot in RAW, but accidentally left the camera in JPEG from some shots I took at a playground over the weekend), my 300mm lens wasn't nearly long enough for this kind of activity.

One thing that made this shot kind of interesting was that that smoke-looking stuff is the clouds. Somehow, the ND filter I was using (and that arrived just in time, yesterday) did that to the clouds. Maybe it's a polarization effect. I'm not sure; I'll have to experiment later.

Anyway, for those wondering, it was an 8-stop ND filter, ISO 450, f/8, 1/500s exposure. And to avoid the danger of blinding myself by sighting the shot, I used the camera's LIve View feature to aim. I'd like to make some comment about having a better lens (maybe a telescope?) the next time around, but I'd have to significantly outlive the oldest person ever to be around for that (by several decades). And if, by some miracle, I am, I doubt I'll be thinking too much about photography.

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