sabotabby | Night photography and bonus kitties

Drove up to Gravenhurst yesterday to do a workshop on night sky photography at the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve. Gravenhurst is very pretty, as is the preserve. I've never done night sky photography before and it is well out of my comfort zone of environmental and studio portraiture + graveyard photography with a 80 mmm lens at f1.8 for maximum artsy.

Overall:
+ Instructor was amazing.
+ The other people in the workshop seemed really cool and were at varying levels of skill so we could all help each other.
+ My new lens rocks.
+ It is very, very pretty up there.
+ SAW A FUCKIN DEER OMG LIKE REALLY REALLY CLOSE

- BlogTO posted about Torrance Barrens and now it is full of people. Which wouldn't be such a problem if 90% of them weren't complete assholes. There is a complete fire ban and you're not supposed to have bright lights there or camp, as it's a dark sky preserve, but did anyone pay attention? It is crawling with dickheads wanting to have their cookouts and basically endangering the whole region to make hot dogs.
- My camera has some quirks that I was eventually able to figure out but which, basically, are not apparent in the type of photography I typically do. So while I'm pretty confident with it in general, I felt like a complete n00b fumbling around in the dark.
- Tripod is okay but not great. Which, I got it for okay-but-not-great prices and in general I don't need a good one. But.
- You can't see anything when you're shooting at night, including the controls on the camera (which, okay, as I know them fairly well), but more importantly you can't see the composition of the photo you're shooting. So you just have to shoot a lot and guess.
- Y'know, I don't really like plain landscape photography as a genre. I was hoping I could do some posed shots with the night sky as a backdrop but it was just too crowded and people kept walking into the frame or swinging flashlights around.

So in conclusion I know how to do it now, but none of my shots were a m a z i n g. I'd like to do another shoot, pref. with a model, in the area but not at the preserve itself, as there are tons of places where it's just as dark but not full of wankers.

Ten minutes or so from the preserve, there's some gorgeous marshland.

As the sun was going down...

Some assholes making a fire.

Okay, they're trying to do light painting, which I understand, but it's super annoying.

Fire assholes after they'd brought their fire to a reasonable level, not that they should have had it at all.

Oh hai stars!

I kinda like this one.

Bit o' the Milky Way.

More Milky Way.

FWIW, this is my photography comfort zone:

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

minoanmiss

*wallows delightedly in your beautiful photography*

sabotabby

Awww thanks. But it's so beautiful up there and I captured, like, a fraction of it. And I have A Certain Vision of a particular look I want to shoot, which you can't get with the level of crowded it was. At least I know it's possible to do and how to do it, though!