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I spent the day at Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport – the annex of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. This time, I left the flash in the bag and shot at 1600 ISO and got some amazing results.

I brought my fastest lenses, but I never had to shoot at f/2.8. I spent most of the time at f/8 to f/9, but my shutter speed was no faster than 1/30 of a second. In fact, for a good portion of the time it was 1/10 or 1/20. Thankfully, my Tamron 28-70 has fantastic Vibration Control (VC). That allowed me to hand-hold the camera for all of my shots. This is great because the museum doesn’t allow tripods or even monopods (sometimes, you can get away with a monopod when they don’t allow tripods).

When I got home for processing, I was amazed at how bright everything turned out. For most of my shots, I had to turn the exposure down to give it more of the museum atmosphere which wasn’t as bright as the pictures led you to believe.

I’m always amazed at how they got everything into that building. But the planes and ships are awe-inspiring. I could spend hours in the space hanger alone. The last time I was there in 2011, the Enterprise was in the hangar. Now that the fleet is retired, they’ve replaced it with the Discovery. The difference is amazing. The Enterprise was clean as it never saw space and never had to go through re-entry. The Discovery is dirty and shows how well used it was. The tiles are scratched, worn, and dirty. The white panels that cover the sides and the rest of the ship also show their age. But looking at her makes your heart swell with pride. She’s beautiful.

For this shot the camera setting were: ISO 1600, f/8.0, 1/30sec. For post-processing in Adobe Lightroom 4, I dropped the exposure by .6 stops, slightly decreased the contrast, brought the highlights down to give it more of the museum atmosphere, opened the shadows to show more of the detail in the ceiling and increased Clarity, Vibrance (I love that slider) and Saturation.