We went camping the other day, and to be perfectly honest, I’m a bit embarrassed by how FEW photos I took.  The advantage to night camping (particularly at my age) is I can get night shots – stars, milky way, etc.  But I took only a handful of photos… and didn’t stray far from the fire.

This time of year, there is still some snow on the ground, and the overnight temps can be chilly.  So I didn’t even get out the tripod.  I handheld my camera and took a couple pix of my favorite model – my faithful and patient love-of-my-life husband, John.

It stuns me the quality of photo one can get in our digital cameras these days.  With ISO’s that can go up to 200,000, one can make a pitch dark photo look like daylight.  In the old days of film, you could buy high ISO film, but you paid for it in graininess and noise in your photos.  Forget about using your zoom or stopping down your aperture, it was just grainy.

The photo above was taken at an aperture of f/9.0 at 4000 ISO.  Amazing right?

Above was taken at f/4.0, 10,000 ISO.  By shooting with a large aperture I could not only draw in as much light as possible, my depth of field is shallow, and I grab the cast glow from the fire.  It’s just amazing to see what modern digital cameras are capable of.