Author Topic: Some stuff from the weekend  (Read 101787 times)

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #180 on: January 02, 2013, 23:20:34 PM
Nice work, was it long exposure or did you stack some shots?

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #181 on: January 03, 2013, 08:42:03 AM
Its a stack of I think 43 30 second exposures, that seems to be the better way of doing it or you could get lots of hot pixels and noise.  The only thing that's awkward with lots of exposures is if you have to edit them all, which I did with this but thankfully lightroom lets you sync your edits across lots of photos so it wasn't too bad.

Got a few ideas for more places locally I can do the same sort of thing but the clouds have returned boo.

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  • Offline Clock'd 0Ne

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Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #182 on: January 03, 2013, 10:30:53 AM
Maybe it looks different at full resolution but I like how in that smaller photo it looks almost like 8-bit graphics :)

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #183 on: January 03, 2013, 13:05:57 PM
Maybe it looks different at full resolution but I like how in that smaller photo it looks almost like 8-bit graphics :)

Haha yeah it does a bit, its fine full size though bar a couple of stars once the weather clears up a bit again I'll see how many more 8-bit startrails I can get.

  • Offline zpyder

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Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #184 on: January 03, 2013, 15:47:27 PM
Nice work!

Driving back on new years day at night the sky was really clear, quite surprising as I was going through areas with lots of light pollution at the time. Made me think about doing some astro stuff but I couldn't be arsed due to having been driving for 6 hours at that point!

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #185 on: January 03, 2013, 22:47:59 PM
Nice work!

Driving back on new years day at night the sky was really clear, quite surprising as I was going through areas with lots of light pollution at the time. Made me think about doing some astro stuff but I couldn't be arsed due to having been driving for 6 hours at that point!

Yeah trying to think straight after that much driving is never going to work right.  I can imagine doing a star trail shot where its totally bitch black getting lots of stars but it might also end up being too many, I was surprised how many I managed to get where I was.

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #186 on: January 05, 2013, 22:41:33 PM

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #187 on: January 06, 2013, 20:53:07 PM
That is an awesome shot. Love it.

How does stacking shots work? Looks like you've avoided blowing out the foreground and still got loads of detail in the sky, I thought you'd need longer exposures to get that kind of detail in the sky. Over what period are your 30s shots, continuous? 
Formerly sexytw

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #188 on: January 07, 2013, 13:19:58 PM
That is an awesome shot. Love it.

How does stacking shots work? Looks like you've avoided blowing out the foreground and still got loads of detail in the sky, I thought you'd need longer exposures to get that kind of detail in the sky. Over what period are your 30s shots, continuous? 

I've cheated a bit really I've used a seperate exposure for the tower, the skies made up of 50-odd 30s exposures taken one after another with a locked off cable release, as long as you can see some stars then you don't need anything longer and anything longer would have blown out part of the sky or tower with the street lights.  I've then imported them all into lightroom and edited one of them, synced the edit across all the photos & exported to jpgs and ran through the startrails.de software and saved that as a tif.  Then took the first photo and used photoshop to edit it to get some nice detail in the tower and put the two together and used a layermask to just include the tower, none of the trees in the foreground, quick bit of USM and then all done.

Its actually ended up being quite a lot like how it looked when I was taking the photos, I'd never have been able to get the tower right and get the startrails in one shot.

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #189 on: January 07, 2013, 14:36:28 PM
So that's only about 25 mins worth of shots? That's pretty tempting. Really like the final result.

Annoyingly my D70 (not D70S) cant have a cable release, only IR which is much more effort.

I assume the star which everything is pivoting around is the north star, was that intentional?

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Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #190 on: January 07, 2013, 15:44:17 PM
So that's only about 25 mins worth of shots? That's pretty tempting. Really like the final result.

Annoyingly my D70 (not D70S) cant have a cable release, only IR which is much more effort.

I assume the star which everything is pivoting around is the north star, was that intentional?

Yeah 25 mins roughly, just as long as it took me to get bored of standing around and checking my phone lol.  Fairly sure it is Polaris, it wasn't intentional tbh I got to the site and setup so that I had a good composition on the tower & trees rather than trying to get any particular stars in but it worked out quite nicely.

Not quite as easy to do with a IR Release, a friends got the same problem his D3000 doesn't do cable releases.  I was thinking about trying to use my RaspberryPi to trigger an IR release then it would be easy enough to program a one of them to sit there pressing the button every 30 seconds or so.  All I'd need then is an external power supply but they seem to be easily got off ebay.  Other than that the only other way I've heard of doing was using an elastic band to hold a pencil rubber/eraser onto the shutter release, should work just the same the first shot may need to be scrapped as there'll be quite a bit of vibration when you set the elastic band.

  • Offline zpyder

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Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #191 on: January 07, 2013, 16:30:15 PM
Are there any smartphone/iphone apps out there that you can use to control the camera?

I've seen a couple for android that basically make use of usb host to enable live view through your phone or tablet. Not quite as swish as the new Canon slrs that do it wirelessly, but still kinda cool. I can see the merit of having a tablet positioned next to a camera, with the screen facing the model/you, so you can compose everything "on stage".

Could you also use that flickr group that automatically identifies the stars for you? Put one of the photos from the stack in the group and hope it says Polaris is there?

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #192 on: January 07, 2013, 16:43:00 PM
Are there any smartphone/iphone apps out there that you can use to control the camera?

I've seen a couple for android that basically make use of usb host to enable live view through your phone or tablet. Not quite as swish as the new Canon slrs that do it wirelessly, but still kinda cool. I can see the merit of having a tablet positioned next to a camera, with the screen facing the model/you, so you can compose everything "on stage".

Could you also use that flickr group that automatically identifies the stars for you? Put one of the photos from the stack in the group and hope it says Polaris is there?

I've seen a couple of different ones, none I've looked into too much mind.  I seem to remember there was one that used the headphone jack a specialist cable they made and the software to fire the trigger but that needed a cable release port.  Don't think I've seen any that use IR to fire them off but I don't think many phones have IR these days, bit of a shame or it'd be idea.

I'd love the idea of having a tablet connected up so you could see the results straight away especially with something like this were you can't see any of the shots until you stop taking photos which might mean you've just wasted half an hour or so.  Hmm got me thinking about the wlan adaptors for nikon, it won't work the same as the D4 where you can get live view through it like the Canon's but it would at least dump the picture over wifi onto something like a laptop or tablet, the official ones are expensive but I wonder if someone's managed to DIY a one together.

I've thought about putting up one of the photos from the lighthouse startrails as its quite a good photo by itself, might do it for both just so I can see what was there, thats a handy group when it works.

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #193 on: January 08, 2013, 20:02:24 PM
Look what I've managed to win



A Lee Big stopper, Filter Holder and Lens Ring, I started my Lee Filter collection last year so I don't need the foundation kit which I'll ebay later on this week but I did need the lens ring and of course the big stopper itself.  Only got them last night so haven't had a chance to give them a go yet but hopefully will this weekend.

Re: Some stuff from the weekend
Reply #194 on: January 14, 2013, 13:39:50 PM

10 Rocks with the 10 Stop by russellcram, on Flickr

First one with my big stopper

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