I have been attempting to capture fireflies and stars in the same shot. Technically, the featured image here is a success; there are both stars and lit fireflies in the image. But, I wanted more fireflies, and I wanted them in the trees. The several here are in the sky and look like a couple extra yellow stars. They are in the center, just above the middle tree’s edge. The red noise is intentional in post-processing, in order to bring out the edge of the trees a bit.
Suffice to say I have some more work to do on this concept. One frustration is focusing in the dark. I was using my trusty Nikon 18-55mm AF-S VR, a great capable and sharp kit lens. The shortcoming for this application is that it has no printed focal distance indicator. Most lenses for reasons I don’t know but may look up before the end of this post are designed to focus a little past infinity manually. Without a focal index, it is very hard to set on infinity in the dark where you can’t really see detail to focus on manually. Additionally, the preview screen is not helpful either; it makes things look sharper that they really are when viewed full size. When working wide it’s not as much of an issue; it’s not too hard to look sharp as long as the image size is kept small, as in the present photograph, but zooming at 55mm I just could not get it right at all. Next time, I’m using my Tokina 11-16mm or my Micro-Nikkor 60mm AF; both have focus indices.
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