Evening skies are fairly lovely right here in Sedona, Arizona. I search for nearly any excuse as of late to level my cameras towards the heavens. The most recent ‘excuse’ was the Geminids on December thirteenth. Right here’s the story of capturing and submit processing this picture.
How have you learnt?
How do you be taught of astronomical occasions? One of the best data I discover on the sky for pictures is thru the APP Photopills. It lists all meteor showers and the anticipated variety of strikes, also called one of the best time to {photograph}. It additionally tells you the place the origination of a lot of the bathe can be. Add to that the Evening AR view the place you’ll be able to overlay the evening sky occasions over your scene and you’ve got an incredible planning device. This isn’t a tutorial on Photopills however let me inform you will probably be one of the best 10 {dollars} and ninety-nine cents you’ll be able to spend on data for photographing the evening sky!
Geminids
I wasn’t in a position to get the place I wished to go because of the snow and moist, muddy trails. These photographs had been constituted of the parking zone with the view of Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte in Sedona on the Bell Rock Pathway Trailhead. I arrange two cameras, each Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III. Lenses had been 7-14mm f/2.8 M. Zukio Professional and the 8mm fisheye f/1.8 Professional M. Zukio. I’ll share a bit extra about capturing gear and arrange in one other article.
Digicam settings
The cameras had been set to twenty seconds at ISO 6400 with one second between exposures. If you find yourself establishing your timing ensure that your entire settings are appropriate. I couldn’t determine why one in every of my cameras was not firing instantly after the earlier publicity. Unintentionally the interval was set to 1 minute and one second between exposures. I in all probability misplaced forty-five minutes of frames as a result of that mistake.
Guide publicity with a constant white steadiness is essential. Test your Histogram with a take a look at shot to be sure to aren’t underexposing the scene. Should you severely underexpose, which is straightforward to do, you’ll get tons of noise as you attempt to open up the shadows.
An amazing function on this Olympus digicam is Starry Autofocus. In that mode when the digicam signifies it’s in focus there is no such thing as a want to fret your stars can be in focus. That was at all times a difficulty. Used to hate coming residence from an evening shoot and be barely out of focus!
Any automated settings permitting the digicam to make selections can result in adjustments that may seem as flicker when you determine to show the body sequence right into a time-lapse. Extra on that in one other article.
Put up manufacturing
I chosen all of the frames. Opened in Adobe Digicam RAW and made international changes. I moved to the “Masks” space of ACR and enhanced the Milky Manner which was arching over the scene and likewise used two “Linear Gradients” to regulate the sky and foreground individually.
Again into Adobe Bridge, choose the photographs that contained meteor streaks. Not a bunch on this case however the story works. Opened my grasp picture and meteor images. Aligned the background with meteor photographs and used masks to permit the meteors to indicate.
Added just a few adjustment layers with masks to appropriate shade and tones. Virtually completed.
Since this set of photographs was made with the fisheye lens, I used the “Remodel Device” to straighten out the horizon.
Now it’s completed.
Yours in Artistic Pictures, Bob
