Astrophotography - Windmill Nightscape

Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 12-24mm f4 lense, Slik Pro 500DX tripod & Viltrox Remote.

A new moon and clear skies were forecasted for a few weeks ago so after getting permission to get on this property with a windmill, I ventured out to the location at 11:00 PM. A security light lit up the windmill so I didn’t need any speedlights on this nightscape shoot.

The above equipment was used in manual exposure mode with a shutter speed set to bulb, aperture at f4 and ISO at 1250 or 1600. I used the D90’s live view to help accurately focus the lense on the windmill. The Viltrox remote was set to do anywhere from 6 to 45 second length exposures. The 45 second exposures were used to create the star trail images by shooting each image 5 seconds apart for a total of 45 images.

In Capture NX-D, I adjusted the white balance to fluorescent and picture control to sport. The exposure compensation was increased 1/3 of a stop. To help reduce noise, I clicked the astro noise reduction feature. Shadow/Highlight sliders were also tweaked if need be.

StarStaX was used to create the star trail images by stacking 45 and 22 shot collections of the images together. Because I only separated each image by 5 seconds, I was able to use the gap filling function in StarStaX to make sure the star trails didn’t have any holes in them.

I opened the Tiff files in PSE 11 to do the final adjustments on these nightscapes. I had properly exposed images for the windmill and the sky so I had to blend them together using layer masks and the brush tool. The clone tool got rid of unwanted objects in the foreground of the image. Once all the adjustments were done, I sharpened the final image with a high pass filter.

With a new moon forecasted next to be in mid October, hopefully I’ll be able to capture harvest equipment below the beautiful bright sky filled with billions of stars. 

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Summer Flowers - Sunflowers, Tiger Lillies & More

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 with 24-120 mm f4 lense, Nikon D90 with 35mm f1.8, 12-24mm f4, 24-120 mm f4 and 75-300mm lenses. Nikon SB-700 Speedlights, Slik Pro 500DX Tripod & Viltrox Remote.

During the summer months, the flowers were in full bloom and on a few still nights, I got out with my camera to capture the bright colors. The D750 captured the lilies, hollyhochs and the purple flowers during the short time I had the rental. The sunflower plot was not in bloom during my rental so I captured all of them with the D90.

I used the above equipment with the following settings: aperture of f9-f18 (f16 & f18 was used to get the sunbursts around the sun), VR off and manual focus on the lense. ISO was either at 200 or 400 and the exposure compensation ranged from 0 to -2. The EC was set to negative when I used the SB-700’s to light up the main part of the flowers.

In NX-D, the white balance was adjusted to direct sunlight and picture control to either landscape or nature-landscape. These adjustments helped bring out more detail and saturation to the flowers. If needed, the highlight/shadow sliders were adjusted as well. Only a few images were turned into HDR, so I used -1, 0 & +1 exposure compensated Tiff files in EasyHDR to process them that I created in NX-D.

Using PSE 11 to finalize the images I first used the clone tool to get rid of unwanted objects in the images. If local adjustments to the exposure in certain parts of the image needed adjusting, I used curve adjustments and layer masks. The final step was using the high pass sharpen filter to sharpen the images.

Now that summer is winding down, it’s time to capture the scenes of waterfowl hunting, harvest and starlit nights.

 

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