First postings from Ignight Festival... Excalibur isn't just a sword, it's also a Machine Gun! (and a time lapse interval shooting machine...)

  Last weekend I had the pleasure of shooting Ignight Fire and Flow festival in Joshua Tree, Ca. Since my shoulder was hurt and I couldn't really do any spinning, it wound up being an advanced photo lab for me. I had a blast, learned lots of things, got some great shots, reconnected with some old friends and also made some new friends. I will be slowly going through all the images and posting galleries throughout the next week until I get them all up, this is the first installment.

  One quick lesson was that 110 degree temperatures presented an unexpected challenge. I expect metal items left out in direct sunlight to get warm. No surprise there. But I did not expect this to happen to my camera in the short intervals it was dangling from my strap. But it did. So, I decided to keep it in the camera bag and in the shade when I wasn't shooting. The real surprise was that even that didn't help. Pulling the camera out of the bag even when it was kept in the shade it was almost too hot to handle. (I won't even mention the water bottles and trying to drink hot water all day) I was worried about the sensor getting overheated, but it never did. Exalibur handled the heat better than me. But next time I will wear gloves.

  Lessons two and three are expansions on my prior review of the D4. I got to really put a couple of features of the D4 to the test on this trip. First, I decided that since I was in the desert on a weekend with no moon, I would try to capture some star trails. I had tried once previously on a SAR campout, but didn't have any luck. This time came out better. First I tried the "time lapse" mode. What I didn't realize was that the time lapse mode automatically takes all the shots and collapses them into a movie file. This is a cool feature I will have to play with later, but not what I was looking for to create star trails. Thus ended Thursday night. Did a bit more research and manual reading, turns out that what I wanted was interval shooting. So, I set up a roughly 3 hour series of 30 second exposures, wide open on the 24-70mm, pointed at the North Star. Combined them afterwards using the StarStaX App for Mac. You can see some light pollution from passing spinners, and it isn't as clean as I would like, but as a first real attempt at it I am pretty darn satisfied.

   The other feature I finally really got to test out was machine gun mode... continuous high speed shooting. It was so bright and sunny during the day that I had plenty of light to shoot at stupid high shutter speeds, so I headed out to the knife throwing and archery workshops Saturday afternoon. I put Excalibur into machine gun more, and tried to get some shots of knives and arrows in flight. Got lots of good knife shots, managed to get a couple of passable ones at archery. Archery was harder, difficult even shooting 10fps at 1/8000sec. Did the math after talking to one of the instructors, the bows they were using would give roughly a 200 foot per second arrow speed, so in the tenth of a second between frames that arrow would travel roughly 20ft. The knife throwing was also easier to time, it's pretty obvious on a throw when the thrower is going to release, but archers draw and aim, take their time, and if there are tells that let you know when they are about to release, I am not familiar enough to notice them. But still, managed to get a couple of arrows in flight. Something I never managed to do with the D3200.

   

   So, that's the first installment, full galleries will be viewable here as I get them uploaded. Enjoy!