Some Cool Night Shots

post # 84 

The Arts

      These are some pictures I took using my digital camera and long to medium exposures.  I had some that were surrealistic, but they somehow vanished completely from my computer using extremely long exposures.  And the disk I saved them to isn't working either.  It somehow got damaged and when I put it in the drive I get a message that reads, "Data unreadable."  I'll just have to set it all up sometime and shoot them again.  
      The ones I'm posting tonight I only have because I posted them at one time to Facebook.  

      The first three here are the moon (obviously).  All I used was a tripod, and I played with the exposure, and some of the effects.  

          This one came out so crystal clear you can almost feel the texture of the moon's craters. 

      This next batch was of the full moon again, but as it back lit the clouds that were out that night.  They remind me of the skies in those horror/monster movies made mostly by Universal Studios back in the late 1930's, 40's, and the early 50's.   These were the Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula movies starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney Jr.  

In this picture (above) the exposure was about two whole minutes.  At that exposure time, the clouds look like they are just whizzing by.  

      In this last one, take note of how light the sky is.  Then look at the direction of the shadows.  They appear to be going the wrong direction - toward the light sky.   This picture was taken at about 1:30 to 2:00 AM.  Again I used a two minute exposure time (which is the max for my camera).  That light sky is actually straight north.  Although here in Northern Minnesota we still well over a thousand miles, or maybe two thousand miles (I don't really know) from the Arctic Circle, and we don't see the sun, or even a twilight throughout the night, the northern sky in the middle of the summer never gets completely dark.  There is always a mild glow like from a city (that isn't there).  The sky never actually gets black or even dark blue, but varies between a royal blue color to a medium blue.  The light that is making all the long shadows is from a full moon to the south.