Learning from the stars

After hearing about the Leonids meteor shower, I knew I had to try and capture it with my camera to learn more.

There are a couple of things I've learned from attempting to take these shots.
#1: Find a darker spot. The light pollution from the city affect the shot of the stars, resulting in the whiteness at the bottom of this picture which I played around with on photoshop. The lights giveth and the lights taketh away.
#2: get a remote for longer exposure. I tried to manually hold the shutter at the bulb setting for as long as I could, but even the slightest movement can cause blur. A remote would help my D40 prolong its shutter for up to 15 minutes at a time instead of the 30second preset.
#3: There are many many stars that can't be seen by the naked eye. I could only really see the brightest ones that night but not all the ones that are here in the picture.
#4: Landscape is important. Like my friend once said, there needs to be something boring in the picture to enhance the interesting parts. Perhaps the rule of thirds need be applied with the bottom third as the tree line or something.
#5: Make sure to pre-set focus to infinity before taking the shot. It is difficult to notice blur when everything is dark through the viewfinder. Since my kit lens does not come with a focus meter, an advice I read was to pre-set earlier in the day by taking a picture of something far away with autofocus and remember the position for later use.
#6: Bring some buddies and warm clothes. I went by myself to take pictures and couldn't capture any of the shooting stars in the shots. However, I did see a couple and the enjoyment of that would have been maximized with more people.

and #7 without a picture: RAW files are interesting. I took all of these pictures using the RAW format for the first time and it is very interesting and useful in situations where one wants to edit pictures. All I needed to do was to open the RAW files up in Photoshop and the options were there for me to tweak as I wanted it. However, I realized that such a process is also daunting. If there were many many shots, I would have had to go through each one and edit as I see fit, which is extremely time consuming. RAW is fun to edit, but time consuming. JPEG is more restrictive with editing, but is good to go. Those are the give and takes.