Plum Island Lighthouse and Topaz Star Effects

I was invited to a photo interest group in Newburyport Massachusetts last night and since I had arrived up there early I I drove down to Plum Island and photograph the lighthouse at the tip of Plum Island in the dark. I utilized my Roninkon 24 mm lens, which is a manual focus lens, on my D800, on a tripod and I utilized a three second shutter delay activated by or a wired remote. I was at ISO 100, F/8, and a shutter speed of 13 seconds. I did a minimum amount of post-processing in Lightroom and although the camera was supposed to be level I did have to do a slight bit of adjustment to the picture.

Because it is the Christmas holiday season, I then opened the picture in Topaz labs and utilized the plug-in Topaz Star Effects to give a star appearance to the lighthouse light.

Topaz Star Effects is a great plug-in especially at this time of year and is Topaz's December promotion. From December 10th through December 31st Star Effects will be 50% off ($14.99) with this promo code: decstar   Star Effects

Nighttime Snow Event

The weather forecast for Tuesday evening and night was for snow with accumulations of the 3 to 7 inches depending on your location. When it was all over, only a couple inches fell, due to the storm staying offshore. Reading a weather forecasting blog the reason for this is this was a very small system and did not follow any of the normal computer models.

It did make for some nice photographs. I took a series from my front landing of my condo complex. The first picture shows what apparently is the snow coming down extremely fast and hard, but, this is due to a slow shutter speed. The snow was actually coming down very light and fluffy and there was really no wind.

The next picture is a composite which shows a car going by with its lights as a blur, overlaid with soft snowflakes falling.

Tuesday night, was when looking in the sky Jupiter will be the closest to the moon until 2026. The moon did show through the clouds, but no Jupiter.

The last picture is the peaceful night scene after the snow stopped.