Night Trawler

There was a bright moon in the sky, and as I walked across the mud flats behind the Inverness General Store, my fear was that all that moonlight would detract from the starlight. As I set up my tripod, polka music came faintly from the Czech restaurant in Inverness. Vladimir's, it seems is still run by 78-year-old Vlad, and according to this review sometimes features live music from the old country, which must have been what I was hearing. Somehow, the music seemed to fit the slightly sad scene of the wrecked boat forever grounded on the mudbank.

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This is my first, and shortest, exposure of the Point Reyes boat the other night at thirty seconds. Obviously, my fears that the moonlight would produce photos without color was not the case.

A longer, 1,204 second exposure was intended to produce star trails:

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The pair of photos illustrates a spread of aperture-shutter speed combinations, both at essentially the same exposure value: from 1,204 seconds at f/22 at the long end to 30 seconds at f/3.5 at the short end. (”Long” and “short” refer to time.) Since depth of field is not an issue in these photos, the contrast is a good illustration of the differing way exposure time treats objects in motion (the stars).

Here is the last of the sequence of twelve photos of the wrecked Point Reyes trawler near Inverness. I took these photos the other night over the course of a couple of hours. This last capture in the series is also a 1,204 second (20 minute) exposure.

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As I was taking this photo, I was interested in the reflection of the boat in the water. I’ll admit I was pretty bored with all the waiting around during the long exposures and the in-camera noise processing, so I augmented the reflection with a little discreet light painting on the hull with my headlamp.

I also angled my camera so that it was facing due north and the Pole Star. The Pole Star, also called Polaris or the North Star, is almost stationary in this photo while all the other stars trail around it. This is because the Pole Star lies nearly in a direct line with the axis of the Earth’s rotation “above” the North Pole.