Equipment Used: Nikon D750,
24-120 f4 lense, SB-700 Speedlights, Silk Pro 500DX Tripod, Viltrox Wireless
Remote control & Vello FreeWave Flash triggers.
A goal for this summer was to get out at night on the golf course when the
sky was clear, the moon was down and the stars were bright. I wanted to expose
the golf hole along with the starry sky. I was able to accomplish this goal at
the end of May and the beginning of June. I set out with my camera gear
starting at 11 pm and shot until 2 or 3 am.
The D750 was fitted with the 24-120mm f4 lense with VR and auto focus
shut off since I shot everything from the 500DX tripod. Aperture was at f4 in manual
mode with bulb as the shutter speed. The Viltrox remote control or the interval
timer on the D750 was used to control the length of exposure. ISO ranged from
3200-8000 while the exposures ranged from 10 seconds to close to a minute.
My pair of SB-700 Speedlights fitted with Vello FreeWave flash triggers
were used to throw light on the golf hole. I set them to manual power so I
could make adjustments and walked around throwing bursts of light by pushing
the Vello remote while the camera was exposing for the stars. This took alittle
experimenting to figure out the right power and angle to expose the hole.
Processing these starry images started in Capture NX-D by adjusting the
white balance to flash or direct sunlight or leaving it alone. The picture
control was changed to landscape and the astro noise reduction feature was
selected. Minor adjustments to exposure compensation and contrast/saturation
sliders were also made to help bring out the stars.
In PSE 11, I first cloned out unwanted objects such as water hazard and
yardage stakes. On some images, I combined the sky with a different exposure
for the hole so I used layer masks and the brush tool to accomplish that. The
majority of the images, however, I didn’t need to do that. To help brighten the
stars more, I used a glowing edges filter on the top part of the image. The
unsharp mask filter was used to sharpen the image after cropping and
straightening once all adjustments were done.
I used StarSta X to create the star trails on hole #15 by combining
multiple images into one to illustrate the rotation of the Earth in just a
short amount of time. I started taking the first shot at 1:27 am and the last
one was at 1:35 am so in that amount of time, the Earth rotated the length of
the star trail.
I had a lot of fun shooting this series of images in the dark and think
they turned out great. I’ve yet to order my favorites on metal but will be
doing that shortly as they should look awesome.
I’ll be waiting for the next opportunity to capture images like these
the rest of the summer.
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