Night Sky Planning
While presenting a recent night sky image to our photography club at work this week, I was asked a lot of questions about how to plan those kinds of shots. I hadn’t thought about it for a while, but there can be a lot that goes into it if you have a particular image in mind. My goal is often to try to line up something in the sky (usually the Milky Way) with a landscape scene. To make it work I need to figure out when those things will line up, when the sky will be dark enough to see the stars, and how much light will I want on the landscape, all while also keeping track of the weather and sometimes tides. In this post I will list some of the tools that I use and show how I used them to plan some recent images.
Continue readingNight Sky Noise Reduction
I enjoy capturing images at night. The same clear skies that can make a sunset uneventful will fill with stars as the sky gets darker. One challenge with photographing night skies is managing the noise that can result from the high ISO settings necessary to keep shutter speeds low enough to prevent significant movement in the stars. The method that I choose to capture and process a scene depends a lot on the conditions and the composition.
Continue readingFavorites from 2019
It is always challenging to select my favorite images – especially in a year like 2019 when I had a chance to visit some places I’ve always wanted to see. I made a couple of trips to the southwest in February, photographed bears in Alaska in July, spent some time exploring Montana with my wife in September, and brought the year to a close with some Maui relaxation. Each image, including many that I had to cut from the list, brings back great memories with family and friends. I’ve been sharing my favorite images for several years now, but this is the first time that my list doesn’t include anything from the Bay Area or Yosemite. So with that introduction, here are my favorites from 2019, presented in the order they were taken.
Continue readingOne Day – Glacier National Park
This is the third in my series of posts covering images taken within a single 24-hour period. I feel more comfortable calling it a series now that it actually has three entries. In addition to the photos, I will include some of the travel, planning, and technical aspects of these trips. Today’s entry covers the evening of September 11, 2019 though the afternoon of the next day. The subject is my first visit to Glacier National Park in Northern Montana.
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