Firefly

Firefly, originally uploaded by john m flores.

I just came home from an early evening run and the backyard was alight with fireflies. I ran in and got my camera and just as quickly ran outside and though, "how the hell am I going to do this?"

Flash was tried and quickly abandoned, as was any attempt at focusing, or looking through the viewfinder for that matter. What I ended up doing was jacking up the ISO to 3200, manually focusing the DA40 at around 1 foot, and manually setting the camera to F2.8 and 0.5 seconds.

And then I hunted them down. I would see one alight and then try to a) track its flight pattern and b) time its lighting interval. There's was no chance of doing this through the viewfinder, so I just tried to keep the camera around one foot away from the subject, pressed the shutter in anticipation of them lighting, and then tried to track them until the shutter closed.

I shot 75 frames. 69 utter fails. But 6, with the help of pushing the sliders in Lightroom to 11, have some promise. I'd say I caught a little fire and a little flying, just not a lot of bug. Check it out...