And, oh boy! Is it ever dark! Do you want to know why I choose July to experiment in night photography? 1. My kids don’t have to get up early to be anywhere this month and 2. it’s warm outside. I hate the cold so you would never find me out at night in January — even for a great moon shot!

Here is attempt #1. In which I learned that the “blue hour” (the time after sunset but before complete darkness) fades really fast. My kids had captured and imprisoned a gaggle of fireflies in the glass jar and they were supposed to glow brightly in the dim leaves of the tree. Or at least that’s how it looked in my pre-visualization of the shot. The fireflies were obviously not happy about being captives because they were very uncooperative. I couldn’t get but one or two of them to light up and then it hardly showed on the film. And with the long exposure required and the rapidly dwindling light, I only had a few chances to try for the shot before it was too late. Lesson learned — move fast and have cooperative models.

My poor eyes aren’t what they used to be. You can’t imagine how hard it is to manually focus in the dark. I thought I had done an okay job until the next morning when I brought it up in Lightroom. Oops.

Day 3 — in which I realize that at pure night I need an exposure longer than 30 seconds and without one of these I will never be able to do that. Okay, back to the blue hour until I can get out and buy one.

My neighbor’s backyard is always lovely with the red pagoda. Very photogenic, don’t you think? Much better looking than our yard. I feel very badly for them that our yard is their view. It doesn’t quite seem fair.

This is definitely a challenge and things can only get better. I hope!