OT - Day Trip to the Bristlecone Pines

[Frisco]

Pardon the dust spots, I didn't bother to clean up the pictures but wanted to share. For anyone that doesn't know, bristlecone pines are some of the oldest living trees and live to be well over 5,000 years old.

 

[edwing206]

WOW! Simply amazing.

 

[ahuxman58]

Very nice shots !!!!! great colors .1 and 4 being my favs.

 

[nUgZ]

Great work. Did you shoot these in CA??

 

[jcm2m9]

Holy Cow! Those are awesome! Thanks for the new desktop!

I like the first one the best. I really like the lighting.

 

[chica83]

very nice pics dood

 

[Frisco]

Thanks - it was a nice trip but I was actually disappointed because we went to take pictures of the star trails at night but I had never done it before and mine didn't turn out too well. The trees are up in the eastern sierras of CA between around 8,000-13,000ft. We stayed at the summit (~13,500ft) past sunset and waited for the stars to come out. I made the mistake of waiting until after dark to setup the camera, and my friend focused the camera for me (or thought he did - from the pic below you can see that it was not) while I went over to the tree to get enough light on it to help get the lens in focus. I proceeded to take a 25 min exposure in bulb mode to capture the star trails, but it managed to drain the battery completely and I didn't get another chance to take any other pictures. I will try to go back towards the end of summer to try again, and next time I am planning to take a big DIY battery to I can get more than one picture.

 

[BlueCorn]

Bummer on the battery - don't you carry a spare?

Also, something else that you might want to try is using a cable release that you can lock. Set your exposure for 30s and lock the release. It'll just start firing off 30s shots that you can then stack and blend in PS. Same effect, less noise do to shorter individual exposures.

 

[Frisco]

I actually never bought a spare because I had previously never seen the battery go more than 1/4 from full charge from a full day of use, and although I was expecting the battery to drain a bit from the long exposure I wasn't expecting one shot to totally kill it. The standard battery is 1.4Ah, and instead of buying spares, I am actually thinking about using a scooter battery and rig a DC/DC transformer that I can plug into the cam directly when I want it. Scooter batteries only weigh a couple pounds and deliver 10-100X the power of the regular cam battery and can be found for under $20 for the smaller ones. One thing that I definitely want to work on is the lighting, because I really hated the color temp of the flashlight we used to light the tree. Maybe a gel filter or something similar.

 

[asnatlas]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10333917#post10333917 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Frisco
I am actually thinking about using a scooter battery and rig a DC/DC transformer that I can plug into the cam directly when I want it. Scooter batteries only weigh a couple pounds and deliver 10-100X the power of the regular cam battery and can be found for under $20 for the smaller ones.

Do you have more info on this ?? It sounds very interesting...

 

[reefman13]

WOW.......fantastic photos. Those are magazine type photo's and ditto on the "thanks for the new backround"