The *Official Photography Thread*

how are you doing a 15min exposure and getting no streaks in the stars??

 

4min exposures. If I'm correct the scope has a device that keeps it tracking the stars relative to the spinning of the earth

 

oh fancy...yea i have seen those...

never mind..never be able to afford that for years

 

You can get them pretty cheap and using a stacking method, it doesn't look too bad. However, my personal experience is that it's very difficult for the lower end mounts to track with a camera body and lens-has to be well balanced to start and light weight too.

Losmandy have some great products for both telescopes and cameras.

 

still a lot of money..haha

 

If you have a smaller camera setup, the Vixen Polarie is a decent option:

http://www.vixenoptics.com/mounts/polarie.html

One of my buddies has an AstroTrac, which looks to be more "portable" than the Losmandy but I have yet to see it in person

 

just some shots from the other day

 

This is a cool behind the scenes of shooting at the Olympics

http://gizmodo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-olympic-photographers-capture-s-1521746623

 

Very cool!



Also guys, i just watch Chasing Ice. VERY good documetery that i think everyone would enjoy. Its about photographing the glaciers as they melt to help convey the message of climate change. Very power and wow great photos. It is on Netflix to stream.

 

What software are you using to "stack" multiple exposures?
I've seen this done occasionally, anywhere from a couple of hours of 30 second exposures to capture extreme star trails, to shots like this with fewer shots combined to effectively increase the exposure time.

Is this something internal to the camera?

 

StarStaX http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/software/software.html

 

Looks like that might also be useful for HDR, or is it not that complex?

 

I haven't tried it with HDR.

PTgui does stiches in HDR..but i haven't had great luck with it.

From my experiance, there is no one holy grail thing to do everything great. Get one thing for X as then it'll be VERY good at X. And one for Y as it'll be very good at Y.

Not something that does both x and y pretty good..but not as good

That said..i guess you could stack HDR stuff in it..don't see why not..all it does is stack though which isn't HDR. HDR blends muliple photos by either fusing or tone mapping.

stacking is just....stacking..star photographers like it for star trails so you can get the trails without the one huge hour long expousure but just 1000 or whatever photos of 30 seconds. This reduces nosie. THe program also takes common part of all the photos and can make them cleaner so the blacks in the night sky look much better instead of nosiey.


I have no idea how it would do with HDR..i use Enfuse for HDR now or Photomatrix.

 

That makes sense.
So what's a good program for HDR stacking, or is that normally done in Photoshop or Lightroom?

 

HDR rendering?

if you have LR i highly recomend Enfuse. All you need to do is dontate to them and you can donate however much..i did like 10 bucks..and bam. Download and install. It'll work as an stand alone or plugin in LR.

Its the most natrual HDRs i have done.

then Photomatrix is the other big one. More money though..can't remember how much..has much more features on control and editing the HDR files. VERY easy to over "cook" images in it though. But it works great.

 

whoa

 

got a random email from an Austrian girl on her first vacation to the U.S.A. and she wanted a photoshoot... the girl eats more than i do, and she doesn't work out...

what the hell is in the water in Europe?!

possibly NSFW so here is the link to the image i posted on my Facebook page...

https://scontent-a-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/t1/p526x296/1620904_717372998302356_59549450_n.jpg

 

haha... yah, i was in awe...

 

That's a lovely accent you have... New Jersey?

 

Love this thread!

Two of my more recent pics. A state park behind my house: Bracketed HDR 15 image photomerge


And my weapon of choice:

I love these two! Awesome job!

I keep trying to get some good exposures but my entire island has way too many street lights

I worked as an intern at my schools observatory for 3 years and we used to slap my 50D on the 16" f/10 telescope and do multiple exposures. They only came out okay because of weather and thermals. Hope to get stuff like this one day!

This is the best I have been able to get so far:


And M42 through clouds with some really bad air currents and a few focusing issues: Full FOV, no crop.


Might have had some tracking issues in that one too.