Appreciating and learning from others

Hello it has been too long, I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy.

Sometimes I come across pictures from other photographers and am stunned by them. It is usually in part because the type of photography that they do is not my usual type. I find some astrophotography amazing, along with some macro. I dabble in each as can be seen in my Celestial and Macro galleries. I feel that I am better at landscapes and cityscapes than anything else. So I look at other photographers work to admire and figure out how they took the images so I can do something in that genre of photography.

Lately I have been seeing pictures of the Moon that have color in them and I figured that it was from using an HDR process. Through Twitter I have been coming across more of them including ones from Cory Schmitz (@TheAstroShake) a co-founder of PhotographingSpace.com. There is an abundance of information about astrophotography there. So I asked how he got the color in the Moon and he explained that it was increasing the saturation in a RAW file that is not overexposed. I took his advice and an it worked like magic.

The images above are the same picture the only difference is that the Saturation and Vibrance are set at 0 on the first copy and at 100 on the second. Something so easy was outside of my grasp because it is not my usual type of photography. Always learning and asking questions are things that can be done to better ourselves.

Stay safe, wear a mask, and learn something new.

Scott

The Stars

Good afternoon,

More or less back on schedule. So I was at Cedar Breaks with the family a bit ago. If you are not familiar with it, Cedar Breaks is a designated an International Dark Sky park. The night skies are amazing there. After posting some of the pictures I was asked "How did you capture this?" and a response was placed by a friend "Read his photo blog." So I knew that I had to write about it.

For shooting the stars there are a few things. 1st know what you are trying to accomplish. If we are trying to have static stars then a wide aperture is important, star trails not so much. 2nd have a sturdy tripod and for best results a timer setting or a shutter release. 3rd Foreground interest sets a scale. The sky is a big place, if there is nothing but sky it doesn't seem as big. 4th planning helps, I use Stellarium (www.stellarium.org), and Google Star Maps. 5th Having an idea of what you want to capture. And 6th Knowing the Moon and Sun rise/set times.

Tripod mounted, a57 3200 iso 1/6 second 210mm f4 with a cable release. Venus is on the bottom and Jupiter is on the top with 3 moons.

Today I will talk about getting the stars static. So a wide aperture lens and a high ISO are goals here. Focal length can vary greatly with what we are trying to capture. When Venus and Jupiter had a conjunction a few years back I used a telephoto zoom and a high ISO. 

For the Cedar breaks pictures I was using an 11-18mm lens. Again I used a high ISO and as wide of an aperture as I could, to collect more light I used a longer shutter. Now with the higher ISO you risk losing some stars with noise reduction or having noise. I am okay with losing some stars especially if I am in a dark location. Below the noise can be seen and in the second image noise reduction has been applied. ISO 3200, 10 seconds, f4.5. With a focal length like this I have found that 10 seconds in about the longest that I can go and not see streaks or the beginning of trails. If you go and look around you might come across a "Rule" called the 500 rule. I feel that it is bogus, it says to divide 500 by the focal length. In this case it would be 500/11 which would equal 45 seconds. While I was taking pictures I decided to see how long I could go before seeing trails. It was 13 seconds which is a far cry from 45.

So to answer the question of how I took static images of the stars and Milky Way it was using a high ISO, a tripod, a wide aperture, less than a 10 second shutter speed, and just playing around with settings. So find a dark sky, grab your largest aperture lens, then go out and shoot.

~Scott

Again I would enjoy seeing readers photography.