We’ll be adapting our shooting and post-processing approach to still allow single image results while also accommodating a new workflow for people who want better, lower noise results. That has given us the opportunity to test and develop lighting methods.
Since I originally wrote this post we’ve had a few night photography workshops in Bodie (see link above for info). I already have some ideas on how we might adjust our nighttime shooting practices, especially for those precious hours we have when we get permits to shoot at night in Bodie. The goal will be to get better results without too much impact on valuable night shooting time. How many images are needed at a minimum? How many optimum? Are different exposures needed for the foreground landscape? How many and at what settings? Should we shoot an HDR bracket, a sequence of images, or both: multiple HDR brackets? Some of these were time-lapse or star trails sequences that I re-processed to produce a single image result for the first time. Obviously I’ll gain experience and be able to fine tune the process and results, but the initial results are very encouraging. My sense is that you need enough stars to make the alignment work, and the physics is such that you don’t always get enough reflected stars to pull that off. Not all of my star reflection shots worked.
Then I tried stacking 20 files from a single-exposure star trails or time-lapse sequence, shot later that night at a different focal length: I had to process the reflection and the sky separately, since the stars move in different ways in each, then merge the results. It turned out really well for a first pass. I noticed that the program has an HDR setting, so I pointed it at three bracketed Milky Way shots taken one stop apart in exposure. Next I had to try something a little more interesting, like a Milky Way reflection.
We capture star trails sequences of the Methodist Church on most of our workshops in Bodie, so that was a natural subject to start with.
LANDSCAPE ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY STAR STACKING SOFTWARE WINDOWS
I recently built a fast Windows PC, so I downloaded Sequator to see how it performed. On a Mac, there’s Starry Landscape Stacker. So programs have been created to stack the starry sky while masking and preserving the static landscape. Landscapes present a particular challenge, aligning the stars as they move through the sky would blur the landscape portion of the image. 20 images of Joshua trees stacked with Sequatorįor quite some time astrophotographers have used a program called Deep Sky Stacker to align and combine multiple starry images and create a better result.
0 kommentar(er)
