Prompted by Nick Mayo’s new collaboration project (you should really join in on the community if you haven’t already), I took to the country over the weekend to attempt to capture fireflies at night. No, not in a jar, that’s kids stuff. I’m talking about 30-90 second exposures to get organic light trails from our little lightning bug friends. This adventure, with a fellow friend (also named Matthew) as my second pair of eyes, turned into getting many more shots that I’ll share with you below.
These captures were not exactly a walk in the park. Since the NEX-7’s EVF essentially goes black in low light–where here it was almost completely dark–all of the country shots were done blind, focusing and all. If it wasn’t for the hard infinity stop on my 50mm f/1.8’s focus ring, finding general focus would be next to impossible. This is indeed one of the few areas where an optical viewfinder will always be better than an EVF, but that’s a topic for another day.
And a note to myself, I need to get a remote for tripod shots so I don’t have to actually HOLD the shutter open for a minute and a half in bulb mode!
In this shot since I held the shutter open for 90 seconds, the landscape is blurred due to camera shake, yet the fireflies still remain as point sources of light, interestingly enough. Due to the short panoramic nature of this shot, it’s best seen full-size (click on it!).
50mm, f/1.8, ISO 400, 90 seconds
Congregating over a small pond. Not pictured: many, many loud bullfrogs.
50mm, f/1.8, ISO 400, 30 seconds
We’ll call these “bokeh fireflies” (in other words, out of focus)
50mm, f/1.8, ISO 400, 30 seconds
Seems like someone forgot to turn off the bio-luminescence!
50mm, f/1.8, ISO 3200, 6 seconds
The road home, peppered with a few fireflies here and there. Note, the sky pollution seen here is from far-off Lexington’s lights. And yes, there weren’t any cars coming either way.
50mm, f/1.8, ISO 400, 30 seconds
After heading back to urban life with Matthew, we decided to stop at a new fountain constructed in the courthouse plaza. Though in this picture, it may be hard to tell if it is water or lava!
50mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/5th
Perfect, Parabolic, Arch
50mm, f/22, ISO 100, 10 seconds
Shooting Tall
50mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1.3 seconds
Flora, Aqua, and Urbania
50mm, f/22, ISO 100, 15 seconds
Well that’s all for today folks, thanks for dropping by, and apologies for the 3 day dry spell. I had to take a break from all my picture taking to work on editing the ones that I had (and some that I still have!) so I don’t have a huge backlog. I hope you enjoyed this little late-night adventure through the country and back. I will definitely give this another shot the day I have a proper remote release to do a 5 or even 10 minute exposure!
As always, have a great one! 😀
Matthew Durr Photography 
love the long road with the fireflys in the distance
Thanks man, would love to try that again sometime with a remote so I could do a longer exposure stopped down (more DoF), as well as a lower ISO. Thanks for dropping by.