Photos 11Nov18 – Popi’s thoughts: Some of you will have seen some of these images. Some I’ve never posted before. You’ll recognize the locations too. This shoot occurred in November, 2018. I was about 4 months into D850 ownership and was still pretty much overwhelmed by all the things it could do. So much so that I didn’t learn any one aspect fully for a long time – too long. I would spend time learning auto-focus, then while looking up a reference from that section of the manual, I’d see another subject I was painfully not up to snuff with and drift off onto a tangent. Suffice to say, I was still very much a novice that day in 2018, and I was excited because the day before was all smokey too when Donna and I were at Devil’s Slide south of SF, and the sky was incredible. The reason it was so gorgeous is not so very alluring. Wildfires covered the bay area and more in smoke for weeks. I anticipated much more of the same on the north side of SF. The smoke made for super-dramatic imaging.
That was all well and good, except for the night between the two shoots I was out shooting the Galactic Core on Route 5, the closest thing I could find to a dark sky without driving another hundred miles east. It was at Midnight too, to have the least amount of traffic on the highway. As it was I still had to time the shots between headlights coming over the hill a couple of miles south of my vantage point. I wasn’t hugely successful that night but with some patient manipulation I did catch some decent shots of the Milky Way.
Note: The date I use for the article is not the date of the shoot.
Here’s where the problem started though. I had gotten in the habit of resetting the D850 to my default shooting menu every time I put it away for the day. One of the things that does is to clear out any oddball settings I might have made during the day, so I can start from a known setting each new day. I didn’t do that on November 10, 2018. I shot the whole next day’s set with the ISO set to 3200, not even “auto” so it could float. It was hard set to 3200. Every single shot up at Jenner the next day was chock full of noise (you might call it graininess). I’ve grown pretty adept at working around those kinds of issues in post-processing, but some fubars are unrecoverable as were some 500+ photos made that day. 😖🫤😒🫣 I recovered a few well enough to display. I’ve also returned to Jenner, and to Hawk Hill, Tomales Bay, and Point Reyes again and again. With and without smokey skies. The area is never a disappointment.
Photos 11Nov18
This shoot started at mid-afternoon in Tomales Bay and ended at sunset in Jenner-by-the-Sea.
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