Quite the eventful outing today at the lake. Figured I'd try fishing, but that was a big wash for the entire day into the night. Visited 2 locations at the lake today (left the first one due to how busy it was). Played good samaritan and inflated someone's tire on their boat trailer when they realized it was flat, did some fishing (big waste), took daytime shots (yay!), and then stayed into the night for some astro shots (also yay!). The astro could have been better, as the clouds started forming towards sundown.... caused a bit of haze in some areas during shots.
The daytime shots (all taken with Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4):
Playing around with HDR capture, low angles, and artistic use of foreground blur. Seriously though, the park management needs a better hobby than turning my normal fishing spot into a mud pit every year by flattening the shoreline (third year in a freaking row...), and dumping more rocks in that stupid sawtooth pattern.
A crop of the opposing shoreline and some fishing boats.
One of the numerous crows that frequent my fishing area. The full image was a bit overexposed, but I had to reduce shutter to get detail on the crow without upping the ISO... The crop looks just fine though.
A crop of some birds in flight over the water. I have no clue what type of birds they are, but I'm guessing seagulls.
Dusk over the hill, and the end of using the super tak for the day.
The nighttime/astro shots (all taken with SMC Pentax-M 28mm f/2.8 lens):
This was the first image in a series of shots that I took for stacking purposes.... oddly enough, the original first image is better than the stacked output file.
This was the best of a series of shots in which I had set the white balance to tungsten mode (which I use a custom color setting on). I didn't even notice the trail in the bottom-center of the image until I went to post this from my album (I have no clue whether it was meteor or a plane that caused the trail...). Also note the return of the pine tree that edges a lot of my astro shots at this location... lol.
Stars above the shoreline, white balance set to auto, so no compensation for the orange light pollution from nearby towns. Apparently a bug was in front of the lens or something in one area of the picture... either that or something happened where I need to clean the lens.... who knows.
The output file from DSS from 9 concurrent 10 sec. exposures and 4 black frames.
All in all a rather fun and eventful day at the lake. Unfortunately I did not see the eagles flying around today, but I can always get pictures of those later in the year. Already got 3 pretty bad pictures of them earlier this week.