Unloading the boats from the River Solstice paddle earlier in the evening and noted a lot of firefly activity in the backyard (the heat seems to liven them up a bit). Since I totally messed up the paddle photography by bringing the wrong camera body (instead bringing the one with no card or batteries) and since I was already covered in Deep Woods Off, I figured I owed myself some images for the day and the mosquitos might delay their attacks for a few minutes (they figured out they could drill through my t-shirt and the battle of wills began…)
I’ve always wanted to capture fireflies and high ISO cameras are making this more and more possible. Here I used a 7D at both ISO 6400 and some at 12,800. I started with a 50mm f/1.4, which was nearly impossible to focus, so I switched to the 16-35mm f/2.8. Most of the exposures were in the 8-10 second range. While we thankfully have a moonless night, lights from the neighbors and nearby streets limited the exposure times before the scenery dominated the image. (Skyglow was so bad I used a graduated filter in Lightroom to bring the sky back into reality.)
Just a bit of fun to cap off the longest day of the year!
