I haven't been out to see the fireflies this year...well, that is until Saturday night. The skies have been smokey and the nights have been chilly. I decided to go ahead and look for them last night.
They were numerous!
View back towards the house...
This was just at 'Blue Hour' when Venus was visible in the sky. Our home is just to the right of the pines.
Fireflights/lightening bugs prefer the tall grasses and the woods. If you don't have an area that is unmowed, you won't see as many. I stood at the edge of our yard and took this shot of the meadow on the other side of the fence.
For anyone interested in how this was done. I used my Olympus E-M1 Mark iii which has a 'Starry Sky' Auto focus to help focus things in the dark. I used a setting called LiveComp. I set the LiveComp up to a 4 second exposure for 4 minutes. That means that each 4 seconds that passes by, the camera records any changes to the light and adds it essentially as a layer over the previous exposures for 4 minutes. ISO was set at 1600 and I had to modify the white balance.
I know that sounds like Greek to many folks, but there it is...
Setting it up and figuring out where to point it is the hard part sort of.
I stopped while heading to the ridge:
The Driveway...
Tigen Road where I noted that the lightening bugs hung out along the long grass in the ditches.
At the mailbox...
And then I took a 'selfie'. The lights from the town 3 miles away was rather intense and gave the sky an odd color as the humidity, haze, and smokey sky increased the odd oranges.
Could we please get some rain????
Sunday is Father's Day. So I leave these two photos of my father.
Young Dad:
