The one that got away......

I took a punt overnight on the skies being clear enough to try some star trail shots in the beautifully clear Golden Bay skies so I set my alarm for the middle of the night and checked...........WOW!!! Milky Way - eat your heart out!! Whilst it was still a struggle to get out of bed and go and set up the camera (the bulk of the setting up had been done before I went to bed so all I really needed to do was take camera down to my chosen location, set it off then head back to bed.) I'd decided on a reasonably small aperture (f16) and had set the ISO to 100 so as to hopefully minimise the noise so I knew it would be a very l-o-n-g exposure. I was banking on about 2 hours give or take.)

There's something distinctly diconcerting about leaving your prized camera gear unattended on a beach in the middle of the night with the tail of a tropical cyclone blowing rather hard, then heading back to bed!! After about 10 minutes of not being able to go back to sleep I began to wonder about going back out there and sitting with it all........just in case! But I didn't, and I did manage to fall asleep again.

I should learn to listen to these doubts that come to me............if I had I would have found that my planned 2-hour exposure had somehow managed to abort itself after just 8 minutes :( When I went out to bring it all in and see what I'd managed to capture I was soooooo disappointed. There was a heap of promise but nothing like I'd been aiming for :( I still have no idea why it only took 8 minutes of exposure......I've tested it today and it all seems fine. I'm hoping that tonight may bring similarly clear skies but at the moment it's not looking good. I can only hope that the heavy winds blow all the cloud cover away during the course of the night, but to be honest, I don't think it's going to happen.

So - in the absence of my planned star trails, here's a shot of some folks bringing their wee fishing boat ashore on the beach. And I didn't even need to leave the cabin for this shot!! (I sure do hope their lifejackets were on board - it didn't look like the kind of boat that'd stand too much weather!)

Postscript - just re-read this and it sounds like a fisherman's tale.........