Photo Contests Are Back On!

We stopped running photo contests in the forums about a year ago, which was 100% my fault.  I’m making an effort to get the forums active again, so we’re going to start things off with a new photo contest.  The topic is heat and the prize is a way to help combat the heat, a tricked out bottle set up with the bottle (your choice of stainless or Tritan), space saver cup, CapCap, bottle carrier, and whatever else I can find.

Go forth and photograph!

Taking Pictures of the Moon

Alternate title:Â If moon was cookie!

What do you do at 2 AM on a nice night? Probably sleep, if you have any common sense. Sadly, I lack that essential quality, so I go outside and take pictures of the moon. I have posted moon pictures before, and a few people have asked me how I get shots of the moon.  I am no pro photographer by any means and these pics are not that great, but they should help illustrate a few points. Here are the two things you will need:

1. A tripod. You are going to be using long exposures. Unless you are a world class surgeon, your hands are not that steady.
2. A camera. One with a decent amount of zoom is preferred. I was using a 70-300mm lens on my DSLR, but there are P&S super zoom cameras that will work just fine. If you do not have a lot of zoom, you just have to be a little more creative in your shot composition.

Go outside on a moonlit night and start snapping away. The couple of shots I have in this post were on a cloudless night, so I used trees in my yard and focused on them instead of the moon. On cloudy nights, you can achieve some very cool effects when the clouds obscure part of the moon. A remote is also great to have, since you want to introduce as little vibration as possible to the camera that you have zoomed in to its limit. If you do not have a remote, see if your camera has a delayed activation where the picture is not captured until a second or two after you press the shutter release. Many cameras these days let you adjust the exposure time which will allow you to play around with different exposures to see which work best for your conditions.

You do not need a super senstive camera. The moon is plenty bright on its own, especially if you are zoomed in that far. I was shooting at ISO 100, and most cameras these days can go way higher than that. Go outside and see what you can get and be sure to let me know in the comments if you get some really good ones!

Stunning self portraits with the Stick Pic

I was snooping around Gear Talk today and saw a write up about the Stick Pic, an intriguing solution to a common hiker problem. How often do you get to a summit and want to take a portrait with you and some pretty girl (or guy, whatever floats your boat) framed by a gorgeous backdrop? You set your camera on a rock, set the self timer, only to have it fall into the abyss off a cliff. Maybe you just reach out as far as you can, taking a poorly framed picture that contains not much more than your sweaty faces. You could hand the camera to a stranger, assuming there is even one there, and then watch him him bound down the mountainside like a billy goat with your precious digicam clutched in his sweaty mitts.

The Stick Pic is a little camera mount that attaches to a trekking pole so you can extend the trekking pole, have it a few feet out, and take a nice picture of you with plenty of mountain in view. It weighs 10 grams and comes in different sizes that fit what look like the majority of poles on the market. They have a list on their orders page showing which size fits which pole, so be sure to grab the correct size. According to them, they also make custom sized ones at no extra charge, which is pretty badass customer service.

I don’t think I could quite pull this off with my 400 lb DSLR, but that is why I am one of those dummies that carries a tripod on hikes. Don’t be like me, buy a Stick Pic and save your back.