The *Official Photography Thread*

Tripod, long exposure and away from city lights... Moab'ish.

 

Looks good. I'd try putting the tree off to one side next time as well as hit it with a little light from a headlamp and see how that looks.

 

www.lonelyspeck.com

 

A little playing around on the snapseed app.

 

In the wake of the recent fires in Northern California

 

Looks pretty good! There are some clouds unfortunately but you can't help that. Your focus might be just a hair off, are you using live view? It looks like a single exposure to me, is it?

 

I didn't get to too many spots since I was only there Friday, but here's a few shots from F1 this past weekend. Since they're mostly the same but different cars I don't wanna spam them all, so the rest can be seen here if desired.

 

You really took it up a notch with this one, it looks great! Can you explain to me the adjustments you made? All I can tell with my untrained eye is that you appear to have upped the vibrance and/or saturation and maybe added some contrast too.

It is a single exposure and it was taken with a 18-55mm kit lens on a Nikon DX body, so nothing fancy equipment-wise. I did attempt to use live view for focusing, but it was so dark the screen looked purely black. I didn’t even see any of the brightest stars on there and I couldn’t even see my own hand in front of my face. Any tips you could provide for nailing the focus better would be greatly appreciated!

 

You did really well for using a kit lens at what I would assume has a max aperture of 3.5 at 18mm! Seriously. What I would do next time for focusing (if there are no bright stars to focus on) is just do some test shots and then pixel peep to determine if you were in focus and adjust from there. You will eventually figure out where your infinity focus is on your lens when you use it manually.

Another thing I would recommend is image stacking. If you are on a Mac, Starry Sky Landscape Stacker is absolutely the best application to use. On Windows there are a few options, but I do not have experience with any of them. Once you find your focus point and are happy with your other settings then take several shots of the exact same scene and settings. 10-15 works well. I have used up to like 29 before, but it makes it more to work with and takes MUCH longer to process in the stacking software.

Depending on your camera's high ISO performance, your base photos do not need to be super bright to be perfectly useable.

Also disable any in-camera low light and long exposure noise reduction, if enabled.

This is the only one I have on hand, but mine look approximately like this off the camera (I think I actually took this on my 50mm 1.8 so the aperture helped a lot here):



Take 15 shots or so, do very basic exposure adjustments (make sure you sync your changes to all photos so they are all the same) and then export them to your sky stacking program. Stack the images in your software and then make your final image adjustments including any color noise correction or removing any other undesirables (like the piece of Ocotillo you can see in the bottom right of my photo) in Photoshop if needed.

The shot over the Eastern Sierra with Lone Pine Peak and Mt Whitney visible that I posted a few pages back was made with something like 29 shots. It was too many and took way too long to process. I always have a hard time deciding how to process color in Milky Way photos (I still need a lot of work in this area), but I did not really adjust this one too much color-wise.

 

I've never heard of the stacking thing... So for those examples you posted, what settings on the camera did you use for iso, shutter, fstop?

Are you still trying to get good looking individual pictures before stacking or will they be very light pictures until you put them all together.

 

You’re right. I was at 18mm, f3.5, ISO 3200, 20 sec for my picture.

 

That's how I take my night photos... Higher iso and shutter but i guess there's a whole new world out there.

 

It looks like the Eastern Sierra ones were 20 seconds, ISO 2500, at ƒ2.8. I was using a Rokinon 14mm ƒ2.8 manual focus lens. I am shooting on a Canon 5D Mark IV.

The images for the stacking will look just like any you would use on a single exposure. Similar to the out of the camera one I posted. The stacking just really helps for sharpness and to remove most of the noise so you get a nice clear image to work with.

Same settings were used for this one; 20 second shutter, ISO 2500, 14mm at ƒ2.8. 14 frames were used.

 

Nice, are there any issues with the stars moving over that time and then not lining up (20 seconds x 14+ pictures). Or does that stacking software adjust it to line up.

 

They obviously do move slightly, but yeah, the stacking software will line them up perfectly. This also essentially averages the pixels to be the correct shade/color which removes noise. You can also manually align them in Photoshop, but who wants to do that?!

 

If you move to f4, you start to get rid of the vignetting in the corners.
For live view focusing, I use a 4x jewelers loupe to magnify the screen.

This has been the best book I’ve read yet on Night Sky. (I’ve bought and returned several finding them inadequate...)

 

The Rokinon does vignette some but it produces great results for the $215 I got it for!

 

The studio is fairly well-lit but kinda weird lighting, depending on the room. It's all lit by fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and the place is full of mirrors, so lots of light bouncing off the walls. Would the mirrors work well for just a single on-camera flash instead of the softbox? The main reason I'm thinking a flash might be good is to illuminate the dancers from the side instead of from above, where the shadows get all weird and creepy. Otherwise I think there's plenty of light.

I definitely have to look into the 28-70.

Thanks, Ian!

 

Idk about the mirrors. You might get strange bounces.

 

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