Early morning follies: Lake Mitchell with Mount Toll (12,979') - c&c please

Geek

We left @ 3am this morning and went up into the mountains to watch the Perseid showers.. where I ran into a few issues trying to do night photography...

1) In the dark, how do you get the camera to "focus on infinity" so that the long exposures are focused? The milkyway was spectacular.. I tried shooting both Shutter priority and Manually with 30 second exposures.. but it seems like the focus wasn't focused? Shooting with an nex7 with a bunch of different lenses (i.e. all of my E lenses have that focus ring you can spin forever.. here is no "hard stop" you can find in the dark).

2) As the Sun was coming out, being an eager rookie I had all my lenses out in a line on my foam mat on the ground.. ready to grab as the light hit... and when it finally hit I looked down and found all my lenses were covered in frost! :scratch Note to self: don't take the lenses out and line them up without the lens caps on :rofl
What's the best way to clean frost off of the lenses and what's the best way to keep frost off of them period? My bag and everything was covered.

Here's an image from this morning...

The first I like because it makes me remember exactly what it felt like to be there on the shore line this morning....



...but that said, is this crop technically a better image because the trees aren't chopped off on the left?



I need to get better at framing.. that's for sure. Feedback is appreciated. This was my first real "photoshoot" were we actually got up in the middle of the night with the goal of taking some cool pictures.

What a spectacular way to spend a morning!
It was a lot of fun!
I can't wait to try it again without all the screwups :rofl

JC

Geek wrote: »

..

1) In the dark, how do you get the camera to "focus on infinity" so that the long exposures are focused? The milkyway was spectacular.. I tried shooting both Shutter priority and Manually with 30 second exposures.. but it seems like the focus wasn't focused? Shooting with an nex7 with a bunch of different lenses (i.e. all of my E lenses have that focus ring you can spin forever.. here is no "hard stop" you can find in the dark).

2) As the Sun was coming out, being an eager rookie I had all my lenses out in a line on my foam mat on the ground.. ready to grab as the light hit... and when it finally hit I looked down and found all my lenses were covered in frost! Note to self: don't take the lenses out and line them up without the lens caps on
What's the best way to clean frost off of the lenses and what's the best way to keep frost off of them period? My bag and everything was covered.

How to focus in the dark- either do it ahead of time, or bring a light, use a red light and you won't ruin your night vision. You can buy red LED headlamps and flashlights, or just get some red cellophane and tape it over a normal flashlight. If you focus ahead of time, you can usually tape the focus ring in place so it doesn't rotate, I don't bother though, I just use a light. If you have a foreground object you want in focus, if you are shooting wide angle and the foreground is far enough away, infinity focus is probably fine, if it's closer than that, stars can sometimes look ok slightly out of focus, and you'll probably need a strong flashlight to illuminate the foreground.

You want to keep your gear warmer than the night air, and covered up. You can buy battery powered warmers, I had a post on here about the wisdom of using chemical handwarmers for the same purpose, ziggy highly discouraged it. You can probably search and find that thread.

I can't pick between your shots, they both have something going for them.