Last night I headed out into the country with my friend Mitch Miller to try to photograph the Perseid meteor shower. Shooting stars are hard to photograph unless they are abundant and bright. The ones we saw last night were neither. We battled mosquitoes the size of humming birds, heat (it was in the mid-80s and very humid at midnight), cloud cover, and a host of other things including oncoming traffic and train lights, an inability to focus our cameras in the darkness (manually focus to infinity then pull back just a smidgen) and a meteor shower that was barely a sprinkle.
Despite those obstacles, we both had a great time, made some interesting photos and even donated about a pint of blood back to nature. I even got one photo of a meteor!
Camera settings for both photos: Canon EOS 5D, ISO 1600, 30 seconds, f/2.8. EF16-35 2.8 lens at 16mm. Flash in second photo is Canon Speedlight 580EX II, set manually at 1/128th power with black tape blocking about 65% of the flash surface, popped manually. Photos taken east of Missouri Valley, Iowa.
3 thoughts on “Bring on the Perseids!”
I seem to remember a similar picture from your college days.
great picture! Love the summer sky.
Thanks Patty! Yeah, William, I remember that, too. My photo ran small on the bottom of the B section in the Lincoln Journal Star. Also on TIME.com’s photos of the month. Go figure.