Moonlit Palms, Anza-Borrego State Park, California   View Larger Image

Purchase This Week's Print Moonlit Palms, Anza-Borrego State Park, California is available as an 11"x17" Print, matted to fit an 16"x20" frame. Each print is signed and numbered by the photographer. Only 100 prints will be made, so order early to secure your piece.

Image of the Week Fine Art Print Offer Each week, I post an image from my recent or historical work and talk a little bit about it; the process, creative thought, and technical details that contributed to its creation. During the week an image is featured, I offer it as a Limited Edition Fine Art Print at a special price. Each image is printed personally by me on the latest Epson printers using archival pigment inks on acid-free archival paper. The prints are shipped matted and signed and can be framed using a standard size, off-the-shelf frame from your local frame shop. Learn more about my fine art printing process.

Image of the Week

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.

Have questions, comments? Let me know what you think.

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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