17mm, f4, iso 2500, 35 seconds
Shooting at night isn’t easy. I had a really hard time getting the focus right on most attempts, and as I fumbled around in the dark trying to deal with technical and compositional challenges, I experimented with a variety of focal lengths, aperture sizes, levels of iso, and the length of each exposure. One of the things I found most exciting was how the camera would, over the length of the exposure, gather much more light than my eye could see. I would stand for 30 seconds or so in total darkness holding the camera shutter open, but when I would get a preview of the image on the back of the LCD, I could “see” the scene quite clearly. Depending on the focal length chosen, an exposure of more than 25 seconds would likely result in bright stars exhibiting “trails” rather than pin-point beacons of light. I’m sure you have seen the effect of very long exposures where the earth rotates while the shutter is open, rendering long and interesting trails of light in the sky… that wasn’t what I was going for here, but it is something I am very interested in trying out sometime soon.
50mm, f2.2, iso 3200, 22 seconds
Stories from home 
This is gorgeous. You don’t get such starlight in the city. And I think trails would look beautiful.
Thanks. Looking off into the Atlantic helps in keeping the light pollution down for sure.
Really nice. Did you have much noise to deal with?
Bill… I did have quite a bit of noise in these. Nothing that I would consider printing, but fun to shoot and display on the web.
One word – breathtaking!
Thank you very much!
This is just fabulous. I sat and looked at it for several minutes. You must be REALLY pleased. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks Carol… I do like these. The first is from Sand Beach and if you look closely you can see the Big Dipper just above the treeline. The second is a pretty famous landmark in Acadia, and a place that I have photographed often… but not at night.
Reblogged this on Acadian Soul and commented:
These were taken by fellow blogger of mine who lives in the Bangor area, but comes out to the island often to photograph. He’s got way more technical experience then I, so I’m sharing his beautiful night sky photos of Acadia. Please do not copy or share them, just enjoy. Visit his blog and link to a website if you want to see more of his work.
Thanks for the shout-out… much appreciated 🙂
These don’t look to threatening at all, beautifully peaceful…
Thanks Karen…never any danger… just the spookiness of the night to deal with 😉
Nice achievement. Only in the Belgium Ardennes we can capture that amount of stars, and mostly these pictures I’ve tried making were full of blinking airplanes. Thanks for giving the aperture values, David
grz. M
Thanks Mark. It can be hard finding places these days where you are free from all of the light pollution. Luckily Acadia is still pretty clear.
MMMM, very nice night shots – best I have ever seen. I would say you have the touch. Keep it up!!!
Thanks for the very kind words. I’m sure I’ll be trying this again.
Hi David! Just curious about the hour at which these were taken. They are quite nice, btw
Cheers!
Thanks Lizz… the first photograph in the post was made at 9:40pm at Sand beach, and the second at Otter Cliffs at 10:53pm.
Thanks for the info. I was hoping that it wasn’t something like 2:15 or something like that.
I ran out of gas by 11pm… can’t imagine being up all night :}
Beautiful images, there is so much stars !
It’s amazing what you can see if you get a dark sky. The darkest sky I’ve ever seen was in Death Valley, California, but it is surprisingly dark over Acadia.
WoW! Amazing. very inspiring photography. It would mean a lot to me (to hear from an expert) if you visited my blog and gave me some feedback. thanks x
Reblogged this on Atropos xo xo and commented:
Amazing 🙂