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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