I was in Key West this past weekend for my wife’s birthday. I brought my camera equipment but was to busy most of the time to take any pictures. However, I did have one shot I wanted to try while I was there. I wanted to try and capture the Southern Most Point Marker at night with the stars and moon behind it.
I scouted the location the first night I was there to check on the moon angle and contemplate the shot. I also found that even at 10:00 PM there were still people taking tourist shots in front of the marker. I came back the second night a little later to see if I could limit the chances of having a crowd to contend with. No such luck. New people arrived about every 5-10 minutes so I had to keep resetting my shot between groups.
The other problem I had was that the marker is located on the corner of two intersecting streets. In order to capture the stars in the background I was shooting 20 -30 second exposures. Inevitably within that time frame a car would come down the road and cause blowouts on the marker from the headlight reflections. It took a few tries before I could get a usable shot. I never could get a perfectly clean shot. I also had to take a few shots specifically for the moons exposure and then combine the two photos together. I used my Canon 10-22 to capture the Southern Most Point Marker and stars and my 70-200 to capture the moon in more detail.
All in all I am happy with the outcome. I just need to do a test print to see how it looks printed. I have found that star pictures are less dramatic when they are not back-lit by a computer monitor. Also, the stars standout in the high resolution shot more than the web upload shot used for this blog. In the photo below it only looks like there are a handful whereas the high resolution version probably has around 100 stars visible.
