Good stuff, I could imagine the cave being quite difficult, did you have a tripod with you?

And you manged to go and bag yourself a 10-20?

Put the star photos into the photo pool for this group on flickr http://www.flickr.com/groups/astrometry/ it'll try and identify what your actually looking at, didn't have loads of luck with the ones I posted but still worth a try.

Good stuff, I could imagine the cave being quite difficult, did you have a tripod with you?

And you manged to go and bag yourself a 10-20?

Put the star photos into the photo pool for this group on flickr http://www.flickr.com/groups/astrometry/ it'll try and identify what your actually looking at, didn't have loads of luck with the ones I posted but still worth a try.

Will do. I certainly want to give image stacking for astrophotography another go, I just need to find an idiots guide, as it's all either really basic "you need to use bulb mode" or fairly hardcore technical stuff, nothing inbetween...

The cave photos were all hand held, with only a couple of exceptions I used the 24-105mm f4 L at quite high iso's but with about 1 stop of negative exposure compensation. A couple I used the sigma for, but these were resting on the rocks.

The stars or the caves?

I thought about it. DSS generates tifs for output, so I can tweak the end result to darken the sky but brighten the stars, so almost HDR.

I just need to figure out where I can go to try again that doesn't have much light pollution...new Forest probably...

That flickr group is awesome by the way!

Just saw its managed to tag some of the stars in the photos, rather impressive for an automatic script.

The caves, the stars are great as they are.  Its more a curiosity to see what they come out like really it might be a good type of place to use HDR or at least pesudo-HDR.

Cave HDR by Chris_Moody, on Flickr


IMG_3235_ by Chris_Moody, on Flickr

Thoughts? I didn't play around with it too much, just went through the presets in Photoshop. They were either too extreme, or just brought out the detail in the shadows and made the whole image look really flat...

If you want to do some good HDR then check out stuck in customs, I follow trey on Facebook and his stuff is awesome, and he has a brilliant guide, he uses photomatix.

Best results are from 3 or 5 shots, most APS-C cameras will do 3 shot bracketing, you usually have to go to full frame for 5 I believe. 7D only does 3

However using a RAW image still gets good results, so if you have anything that is going to move RAW is a must and a lot of Trey's stuff is actually only 1 shot, most is 5 though.