Image of the Week: Moonlit Palms, Anza-Borrego State Park, California

Today's digital cameras have come a long way.

I love photographing the night sky; so much so that for the past few years, as I've made the transition from film to digital, I've kept an all-manual, 35mm or medium format camera in my bag capable of the long exposure times necessary to capture the low light levels of the starry sky, or moonlit landscape. The mechanical shutters require no batteries to operate and can be held open for hours and hours.

You see, until recently, digital cameras just weren't up to the task. Their imagers weren't sensitive enough to register fine detail at low light levels, and the long exposures resulted in extremely noisy photographs, sometimes exhibiting discolored areas near the sensor edges where electrical charge from the chip's power supply bled onto the pixels. Of course, that would only happen if the camera's battery lasted more than 10 or 15 minutes.

Things have changed in the last couple of years. Imaging chips are more sensitive, they're producing images with incredibly low noise, and doing it more efficiently than ever.

This week's image was an eye opener for me. During the full moon in Anza-Borrego State Park in California, I used a 4x5 Field Camera and a Nikon D300 to shoot some moonlit landscapes. The dynamic range of the Nikon beat the pants off of the 4x5 Fuji Provia film.

From now on, at least at night, the film cameras are staying at home.

Technical Data

Moonlit Palms, Anza-Borrego State Park, California was photographed with a Nikon D300 camera and 17-35mm ƒ/2.8 lens. The exposure was 3 minutes at ƒ/5.6 at ISO 200.

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