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Night Sky Photography

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Night Sky Orions BeltI headed back out to Anza Borrego Desert State Park here in Southern California with my photography buddy, Denise, this past weekend. We took a class in night sky photography at the Anza Borrego Desert Visitor Center and then as the sun set we headed out with the other members of the class to Coachwhip Canyon to put what we had learned into practice. Although the canyon itself in the pre-sunset light isn't all that spectacular compared to others I've seen, that wasn't the point; we were going to be pointing our cameras up after all.

As civil twilight turned to nautical twilight (all the definitions of twilight were covered in the class and it was quite fascinating to learn all these distinctions) the stars started to show through one-by-one at first and then in bursts. Venus was there right from the start in the western sky following close to the crescent moon. Then came the first 3 stars of Orion's Belt, and then there it all was; the Milky Way.

Something that is incredible to observe is that many more stars show up in the photos than appeared to the naked eye no doubt because of the length of the exposures. Most of my shots were taken at 30 second exposures and I tried to keep the ISO setting as low as possible, starting out at 100 in the early part of twilight and not going past 400 as it got even darker so as not to get too much noise.

Right by where Denise and I were taking our shots a young couple showed up and built a campfire and started to prepare a barbecue under the stars. As they arrived I commented to Denise, "Well this will either be a good thing or a bad thing". As it turned out, it was a good thing and the light from their campfire actually added some great additional light and made for a good shot in itself as you will see in this photo: Camp Out Under the Desert Night Sky.

Here's a link to my Night Sky Photography slide show
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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