DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY - Is it a plane, a comet or...

a rocket? Yes it is a rocket! 

An online photographer friend told me about a rocket launch that would happen about 220-250 miles from where I live. I just had to face the west and see it and we had roughly about 20 minutes to get ready for it.

I thought I won't be able to see a thing. I thought it would be maybe a boring distant star.. Boy was I wrong!

Here is a gallery with the pictures in a sequence....

Some explanation- notice the photos are sequenced:

1 - Notice the bright spot and the dark trail. That's the rocket going early.

2 - Still going up

3 - The rocket at this point has left an amazing trail (off camera to the right) and is very bright- creating a cone, widening from the front part

4 - The rocket breaks appart- another rocket and the base rocket. The first part goes on and fades

5 - The trail of the base rocket... the first part of the rocket (off camera to the left) is there but faded

6 - The outcome of the trail of the base rocket, the 2nd rocket smoke is no longer visible.

I used my 50-200mm Zuiko lens with the 1.4x TC teleconverter (100-400mm 35mm equiv times 1.4) for the first four shots.. I regret in a way I didn't switch to wide angle sooner I suppose. The last two shots were made with my 14-54mm (28mm-108mm 35mm equiv) Zuiko lens.. switched in a hurry.

All photos taken from my tripod, from the balcony of my house.

As usual, comments & critique welcome. I didn't realize this town - Vandenberg has a schedule for these launches, which you can check here.

UPDATE: Corrected a bunch of mispelling errors.  Funny I can see them once I have written everything but not while writting my text. Even some grammar.
UPDATE2: Even more spelling errors. I know they are there, so why I write them in the first place? Don't write on a laptop keyboard tired?

Comments

[Bman]

TBH, #3 and #4 don't do much for me, but the rest of the photos look really great. #6 in particular is pretty wild.

[Raist3d]

I think it's kind of natural some are so so since they are just going by chronological order. If I used wide angle while it was going up it would have been more interesting though.

Also I think I got problems with focus. I better figure out how to get my camera into hyperfocal-to infinite correctly because this is going to bite me again in the future in shots like these.

I was simply stunned this would be as interesting as I saw it was.

[crowdpleazr]

yeah, wow, the first two and last two are simply stunning, very beautiful

[Raist3d]

Thanks man. I need to make sure I learn to focus better to infinity in the future for this kind of shots.

Also I may go to Vanderberg to see if I can get close enough to a rocket launch to photograph the real thing from afar with another photographer guy....