Shooting at Night

While surfing this afternoon I found this site by Troy Pavia. He steps out what exactly he does when he shoots at night... I love it.. and its easy to read...even better! His web site Lost America at Night is amazing!

So I figured I would put a schedule for the moon here as well... I think I might try this, although there are not many places around here that do not have man made light... will have to look.. do you have any ideas?

Moon Schedule

Here is another site with some easy points of reference and tutorials about shooting at night. HERE

This next site goes into the custom settings and how to turn on or off the noise reduction, which in turn you have no more hot spots at night YAY! But I will post it here just in case:

"

option 4 - Long Exposure Noise Reduction

As explained in the camera manual, there is risk of noise being introduced if shutter speeds lower than 1/2 sec is used. This setting can eliminate that.

default : OFF,
my preference : OFF.

With this setting ON, the D100 will automatically reduce the noise levels during long exposures, when there is more risk of noise on the image. The noise reduction processing only kicks in with exposures of 1/2 sec or slower.

With Long Exposure Noise Reduction set to ON, the camera will appear to reduce the buffer space, but this doesn’t actually have that much effect if you’re shooting in JPG format, but reducing the buffer space from 4 NEF files to 3 NEF files is a significant reduction. I mostly shoot in NEF format, therefore I keep this setting to OFF for most of my photography, unless specifically needed.

The buffer space counter in the camera says that the buffer is reduced from 4 to 2 NEF files, and from 6 to 3 Lrg JPG files .. so it would seem as if the camera wouldn’t be able to keep up with a fast shooting pace. But in real terms, if the shutter speed is faster than 1/2 second, then most of the buffer space is available since there is no noise reduction processing taking place. The buffer space is then close to what the camera would have had available compared to if the Long Exposure Noise Reduction was set to OFF. (eg, 3 NEFs can be recorded despite the camera saying there is only enough buffer space for 2 files … compared to there being buffer space for 4 NEFs when this custom setting is OFF.)

With faster shutter speeds and shooting in JPG format, having this setting ON or OFF will have very little effect, and may be kept ON for all practical purposes .. unless you need that extra bit of NEF buffer space."