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Firefly Season

Driving through the countryside, out after sunset, and ran into this display. This doesn't do the display justice, there were thousands of fireflies...


10:15pm, ISO 800, lots of fireflies:

fireflies.jpg
 

Erik DeBill

New member
Amazing. I've tried to catch them properly but never gotten this nice balance of background brightness and firefly brightness.

I take it very high ISO is key?
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I can see that electric bananas come from slow shutter speed or a pair of them locked in a mating trance? No, that's probably not it! The effect is caused by the huge increase in brightness caused by the inverse square effect so the light is some much brighter.

Asher
 
Hey Erik,

A high ISO did help! It was tricky to get the right exposure. I found that 1 stop either way would lose the firefly light.

Also, Shooting 90 degrees to where the sun set was not as effective as shooting 180 degrees from the sun. I think the difference is that the sky was darker at 180. The second picture is at 180.

This was, hands down, the best firefly display I've ever witnessed. Maybe its a good year for fireflies!?
 
More again

A hot summer evening here in Michigan, and our family needed something simple to do. So, we drove to where the fireflies fly, and here they are (flies and family and dog):

fireflies3.jpg
 

Angelica Oung

New member
Erik,
I love the dancing, swooping motion of the firefly that you captured. Unfortunately, the ambient light seems too strong to make the fireflies stand out. Maybe if you waited a little bit later where the fireflies would be brighter in contrast to the skies?

The first is my favorite by far of the series you have shown. I absolutely love the closeup of the grass in the foreground. It is compelling because it is unexpected (who gets down on the ground when looking at fireflies?) yet gives one a strong sense of being there. That and the iconic farm buildings in the background make the shot much more evocative than the other two despite the fact that it is perhaps grainier and shows the fireflies less distinctly.

On the technical front, I'm curious...did you use a tripod?

Just my two cents. Good job!
 
Hi Angelica,

Tripod, yes! I arrived at the exposures purely by trial and error. There is this three way balancing act of firefly light, ambient light, and enough time to for an adequate number of fireflies to light-up.

I found that closing down a bit to 5.6 or so at ISO 1100 for about 3 seconds worked well about 30 minutes after sunset. So, it was pretty dark.

Thanks for the comments about this and the other images. I didn't spend a terrible long time in post processing on any of these images. With the high ISO and long exposures, there is some especially nasty grain that could be much improved with some time consuming tweaking I think.

I have one more version from last night that hopefully I'll get around to posting today!

Take care.
 
One More

Again, from last night.

I think more could be done in PS but I spent some time working on the noise and this is the result:

fireflies4.jpg
 
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