Heres something to do if you get the midwinter blues and get antsie. Once while sitting on the couch tring to think of somthing to do i thought hey get up and see if you can get any pictures of anything. I have an older Minolta x-370-slr with opitc lenses, they made a million of them and has a manual mode to hold the shutter open to get longer exposiers. I took off out the door with my tripod and found some turkeys on roost, 8 0’clock at night. This was a cloudy night with low cumulis cloud cover and the lights of the city were reflecting off of them and illuminating the snow. I glassed out in front of me too see how close was close enough to keep them from flying off roost and set up about 35 yrds from them. I setup my tripod mounted the camera and had a 200mm telescopic lens in it. I glassed to see what they were doing and one had its head turned twards me. I aimed and focused the camera and clicked it to manual mode. I held what i thought would be a good length of time to keep the shutter open, about 15 seconds and then let off the shutter. Theres light at night too just not enough to get the speed of daytime photos. I took the film in to get it developed and they took. In the picture you could see the turkey {turkeys} and i could see its eye wide open turning its head too the right. I had color film in but they looked black and white. I had the turkeys and limbs silouete against the low cloud cover. It worked, I’ve also got pictures of deer at night under the amber lighting by the local railroad switching area. Kinda fun to see what they do at night when calling them to get photos. On a dark night with clear skies and very little light i don’t know if i can get any exposier at all to develope. If you do this don’t bring any weapons, not even a pocket knife. They got a guy down here that was poaching and they knew it, he didn’t have any weapons but a tire iron and it stuck! Check with local dnr regulations if in doubt.
September 28, 2003 at 11:20 pm
#197844
