For all the years we’ve owned our place on Lake Ontario, I’ve been wanting to capture the beauty of the night sky on a clear night at our cottage.
With my old camera – a Nikon Coolpix P510 (a glorified point-and-shoot) – I couldn’t even get my camera to focus on the moon and its reflection off the lake. All I got were spots. Blurry spots.
For our eleven-year anniversary this month, my husband surprised me by saying I needed to go ahead and pick out a new camera – a real camera. After some great advice from my photographer cousin, Calli, and a few of my photographer friends, I settled on a Canon Rebel T4i with an upgraded kit lens.
And finally, this weekend, with the help of the tripod my husband uses for his hunting spotting scope, I was able to capture almost exactly what I saw. This shot was taken at around 9:30 p.m. on Friday night.
I’m not 100% pleased yet. I still have lots to learn. I had to use a very slow shutter speed (I think it was about five seconds) and a high ISO (1600), but from what I’ve read, I need to figure out how to get this shot using as low an ISO as possible, a slow shutter speed, and I’m still trying to figure out a good aperture setting for shots like this. But at least you can get an idea – the bright, bright moon, the reflection off the water and the shore. The lights on the opposite shore are coming from Henderson Harbor.
This one was taken the following night at around midnight. The moon was even brighter, the water even calmer, the embers from our leftover campfire cooling in the night air.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m nowhere near calling myself a photographer. I want to learn to take really good pictures of what I see, but when it comes to photographs, I barely know what aperture is, much less how to compose a piece of art. I just want to capture what I see and think is beautiful. I used to sit on the shore and yearn to share this. Now, hopefully, I can learn how to.
