Turning off computers to make extra work / lurking silently in the dark with a camera
A thing that I have wanted to muck about with for, oh, all of three weeks, is arbitrarily long exposures. Mostly because of someone else's startling views of the Milky Way, but also because some of the more interesting images I've hauled from the LC-A/XA2 have been the ones where I've held my finger on the button and my breath for thick ends of minutes at a time. However, since taking the wobbly human out of the loop on the LC-A would require butchering a washing machine to get some solenoids out, I've been less than inspired to follow up on the idea.
That is until some rotter at work allowed that you can put all good dSLRs and most crap ones into something called 'bulb mode' and thus hold the shutter open for as long as you like. All you needed was the appropriate remote control. £1.50 and some Amazon later, I had the appropriate remote control, and set about turning off all the auto-everything on the nearest camera. I felt briefly guilty, and the camera did its best to persuade me that I really didn't want to do that and how about a picture of a nice game of chess. Or a picture of some toast. Everyone likes pictures of toast.
Anyway. I beetled outside into the dark between the gales, horizontal rain, lightning and flash (haw!) hailstorms for a brief test:
That is until some rotter at work allowed that you can put all good dSLRs and most crap ones into something called 'bulb mode' and thus hold the shutter open for as long as you like. All you needed was the appropriate remote control. £1.50 and some Amazon later, I had the appropriate remote control, and set about turning off all the auto-everything on the nearest camera. I felt briefly guilty, and the camera did its best to persuade me that I really didn't want to do that and how about a picture of a nice game of chess. Or a picture of some toast. Everyone likes pictures of toast.
Anyway. I beetled outside into the dark between the gales, horizontal rain, lightning and flash (haw!) hailstorms for a brief test: