Often when you talk about astrophotography, first things that come to mind are Long Exposure and High ISO. For most of the time this is true but then there are times when you cannot use both at the same time and sometimes you just have to stick to short exposure times. Sometimes, the images produced with a short exposure will not have much detail of the sky, but if you are a dark site, it is sufficient enough to capture those details. I recently visited East Cape lighthouse, which is the easternmost point of New Zealand to capture the milky way rising next to the lighthouse. This was my first time so I did not know what to expect. These beautiful beams going across the sky looked so beautiful and I wanted to capture them with the milky way rising. As usual, I set up my camera to a 20sec exposure, ISO 6400, f/2.8 and not to be surprised but the lighthouse was overexposed and I did not capture any of those beams. A bit disappointed, I tried again with slow exposure and got better. Then I thought, the reason I am not capturing the beams is because, when on […]
Processing nightscapes is a challenge that every nightscape photographer faces. Nightscape photographers spend hours under the dark sky capturing the beautiful night sky and spend more hours processing it. Unlike most landscape photos which are shot at faster shutter speeds and do not have noise and darker foregrounds, nightscape images are polluted with noise, dark foregrounds and so many other artifacts that are caused by long exposures. Recently, I attended an astrophotography camp organized by Horowhenua Astronomical Society with Jonathan Green as volunteers for AstroNZ, where i gave a presentation / talk on processing nightscapes. My talk included topics on: 1) Gear required 2) How to capture 3) Post processing in Lightroom and Photoshop. As, this talk was focused on nightscape processing, I also included panorama stitching and processing. Here is the presentation that was a part of my talk at the astrophotogtaphy astrophotography camp.
