Astrophotography on the Farm (Edition I)

Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 12-24mm f4 lense, Nikon SB-700 Speedlight, Slik Pro 500DX tripod, Viltrox Remote & an led flashlight.

One of the goals for the summer was to get out on clear nights and try to capture the stars over different landscapes. So far this summer, it has been tough as the majority of nights have been cloudy but I’ve managed to get out twice and capture the below images.

In order to capture these images, I used the above equipment which allowed me to vary the exposure times. Shooting in RAW and in manual mode, I had the shutter speed on bulb and aperture at f4.  Exposure time ranged from 30 seconds to 15 minutes. ISO was either at 800 or 1600. Autofocus & VR were turned off on the lense. During the exposure to light up the foreground, I used the SB-700 or led flashlight. The SB-700 has a flash-ready indicator light which can also be pushed to fire off the flash at the set power. By stepping away from the corn crib and barn 30-50 yards, I was able to use the flash to expose the whole side of the buildings.

In View NX, I adjusted the exposure compensation, white balance and picture control if needed. Exposure compensation was increased, white balance set at direct sunlight or original and picture control at standard or golf course (custom curve created using Nikon’s picture control utility). I than outputted them into Tiff files to work on them in PSE 11.

Once in PSE 11, I worked on cloning out some of the hot pixels and combining images using layer masks. I only had a couple images were I lit up the foreground of the corn crib, barn and corn so I combined those into other images were I was concerned on getting a good sky exposure. It worked well. The final step was to crop and sharpen the final image.

After capturing the starry night sky, I look forward to getting out there again and improving my technique. For a week during the 4^th of July, I rented the D750 which I wanted to put to the test at night but unfortunately, the night skies have been cloudy.

 

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