Shawn Barney Photography

I’m about a year late, but I really wanted to share these photos. I happened to be on vacation with my family and parents to Disney in February of 2010. Well a few months before I decided to take a chance and find out if there was going to be any shuttle launches as there were only to be a few left. Wow!! The second day I’m there there’s going to be a night launch! I had seen one about 10 years ago when I actually worked at Disney for a semester, but this time I actually had a nice camera and lenses, so I wasn’t about to miss it! (I actually flew down but my parents drove, so they had the luxury of brining all of my equipment…just in case!). This was STS-130 for Endeavor’s last shot as well as possibly the last night launch of a shuttle ever!

The first night was a bummer as it was called off about 4 am due to low clouds, which I’m actually glad happened. The second night came and I got there a bit earlier around dark (about 8 hours before launch) and people were already getting the good spots. I hung out along the coast at a site were many people gather off of high way 1. I hung around there for a few hours, but was getting cold and hungry, and couldn’t stay in my car as I would loose my seat. I took a chance and hoped in my parents truck and went down the coastline to see if I could spot a better place. What luck! Behind an office building was a clearing with a few others already parked there. After backing in and securing my spot, I covered up and took a nap for a few hours (in the meantime it was very cold for Florida this week…and didn’t make things very fun at Disney either!). About an hour before I setup shop and used my iPhone to listen to the local radio feeds from NASA to see how things were going. All Clear!

Up to this point I had also done a ton of research from others on the best way to tackle basically going from dark, shooting into the sun! So what I did was set my ISO at 400 at f 8.0 and bracketed the exposure from +-.5 & +-1 to get me 5 shots at the push of the button. This would allow me to make sure I was able to get a correct exposure as it went from dark to very sunny! I was also shooting with a 300mm lens. Below is a few shots that shows what I was able to capture.

Space Shuttle on the Launch Pad – 12 miles away!

Shuttle just a few seconds after launch

Solid Rock Booster separation at 146,000 feet or 27.5 miles

Here is a collage of the first few seconds of the launch