Midnight at Basecamp

I wondered why I was carrying a tripod with me. At first, I assumed I’d use it for video — just plop the camera down in the middle of a busy intersection and shoot exotic life passing by. But then we arrived at Chomrong and the mountains revealed themselves to me at night.

It was then, standing out in the freezing cold, looking at the first long-exposure night shot of the surrounding peaks that I realized why I was hauling along the tripod.

The moon grew fuller the higher I climbed. The evening skies were always clear. And by the time I reached Macchapucchre and Annapurna Base Camps, it was completely full and very bright.

Even with the moon, the lack of light threw off the autofocus. The GF1 would place the focal point just before the infinity mark, pushing the mountains into a slight blur. Manually focusing to a focal extremity on this lens is trickier than you might think — since there is effectively no ‘beginning’ or ‘end’ to the focus ring (it simply turns and turns and turns) it takes some practice to find true infinity.

The GF1 handled the night shots with a lot of grace. Despite windy conditions and a light-weight tripod I was surprised by how sharp the final images were.

Also, I was pleasantly surprised to find the long exposures weren't as much a drain on the battery as I assumed they would be. I spent hours in the freezing cold (with a hot thermos stuffed in my shirt) exposing and waiting and confirming, over and over again. All without denting the battery indicator.

The one let down was that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't seem to capture detail in the moon. It was simply too bright.