High-speed photos never get old, do they? Actually, yes they do, but I have an excuse for posting yet more of them. It rained a bit on Thursday, and later in the morning the sun was bright enough that I could crank the camera’s shutter speed all the way up to 1/32,000th of a second. Does that make a difference compared to 1/16,000th of a second? As near as I can tell, it doesn’t improve the hummingbird but it does improve the honeybee:
Since I’ve been shooting the night sky lately, I’ve also been experimenting with noise reduction. Here’s the problem: on a digital camera, if you keep the shutter open for an hour or two you’ll get lots of random dots caused by individual sensors firing for no good reason. So the camera has a noise-reduction feature that removes the dots. If you take, say, a one-hour exposure, it closes the shutter at the end of the shot and then keeps going for another hour. It’s basically taking a pure black photo during that time. It then compares the noise in the image to the noise from the black photo and removes the corresponding dots. Something like that, anyway. But it sure does work. Here’s a pair of two-hour exposures:
And finally, here are the moon and Venus last Tuesday, because why not?