Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Stary Stary Shots - Shutterbug desert challenge

High on the excitment of the forming of the Dubai Shutterbugs, the inaugral meeting next week and the creation of this wonderful blog a group of us decided to get together and have our first club outing. We headed out into the desert to take advantage of the new moon and relatively clear sky and take shots of the night sky.......and here are my offerings

YBOD by fire light
I like the soft warm light on this, and I still maintain it is WAY more pleasing on the eye than all those harsh and complicated flashes.



Overlaid Stars
this is 110 photos overlaid in exposure blending software. Believe it or not this is actually my favourite star shot so far from a technical point of view as I am now happy that I have finally got the exposure/aperture right to actually catch the stars and get good quality trails. Lots of scribbles in note books have been needed to get to that point.
Sadly, as it was already dark when we got there I didn’t have any dusk lit foreground to make this a good image and the tree and stars are lost in a sea of dark. But mission accomplished as I can now concentrate on composition knowing the settings are right.

Maybe a bit of time on photoshop at the weekend and I’ll be able to reduce the hallowing, but not sure its worth the effort as the image itself may not be worth it. The majik numbers for these shots are:
f5.6, ISO 200, Time = 30seconds per shot.
All noise reductions turned off (otherwise you get dashed lines instead of streaks as the stars move while the camera does its noise reduction).
Light leak tree & Tree black and white
This was taken on Imogen’s camera more as a comparison of a 1 hour single exposure vs the overlay technique. Sadly my eye piece cap didn’t quite fit Imogens camera therefore I’ve ended up with light leak still.

Still, by converting it to Black and White its not so bad. Maybe not a wall hanger but certainly a screen saver/electronic photoframe effort.

Thanks all for now folks
Steven
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1 comment:

  1. R BaileyJune 24, 2009 at 6:55 AM

    YBOD shots.
    I know you love your YBOD but look a bit soft and the color is to wrong for my taste.
    The softness might have been from the Gorila pod and slight movement.
    You can see the color balance in the number plates, one is purple and the other orange.
    If you don’t want to use flash maybe a bit of a tweak in the white balance would help ?

    Tree Black and white.
    This is my favourite really see the stars well.
    A dusk shot would be nice to add in the tree, however could always cheat and use a flash for a single shot and composite it in.
    A much longer run would be nice as you’d get more rotation, with the composite method you’d not burn it out either.
    Light leak = Duct tape.

    Overlaid stars.
    Think must have lost something in the compression. I can’t see much detail, what I can see isn’t a patch on the black and white tree.


    Think this is going to be an on going project for a long time.

    Cheers,

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