Thursday, October 22, 2015

Astrophotography: Old Barn & Cribs

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 with 24-120mm f4 lense, SB-700 & Slik Pro 500DX tripod.

Back in September on the night of the eclipse, I was excited to get out with my new camera body. Even though the moon was bright, during the eclipse there was a period of time that the sky turned dark and the stars were out. I traveled over to a local farmstead to capture the scene.

The above equipment was used in manual mode with the shutter speed set to between 10 to 30 seconds and an aperture between f4 to f6.3 Because of the new camera body and its ISO performance; I was able to increase the ISO higher than I’ve done with my D90 to 3200. I shot in RAW and turned off the VR. I used my headlamp to shine on the barn to allow the D750 to focus on that in the dark and then I switched the autofocus off. I exposed the buildings by using the SB-700 and manually triggering the flash.

In Capture NX-D, I adjusted the white balance to either direct sunlight for an orange cast or fluorescent for a blue cast in the sky. Picture control was changed to sport or nature-landscape while the exposure compensation was adjusted if needed. I increased the contrast and saturation as well. Astro noise reduction was also used.

StarStaX was used to create one star trail image by stacking just 4 images together that had an exposure of 30 seconds each. This resulted in a very small star trail on this particular shoot. If I would have had more time, I’d done a much larger star trail.

I did the final adjustments in PSE 11 by starting with the clone brush to get rid of telephone lines/poles that were running through the background of the image. To help increase the brightness of the stars in the sky, I discovered that using a glowing edge filter and reducing the opacity to a low percentage, works pretty well. Back in NX-D, some of the scenes I changed the picture control to nature-landscape to help give contrast and color to the buildings so that part of the image was layered into the sky images if I desired to use them. The last adjustment was to sharpen the image using the high pass sharpen filter.


The first night out with the D750 was a fun one and with its much improved performance over my D90, I’m looking forward to continued work underneath the stars. 

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