Milky Way in Goblin Valley

[JimFox]

This is from last week, there was a moon up that set during the night and a few clouds rolled in. It all made for an exciting night with the goblins.

This was captured on the Nikon D810 Sigma 14mm f1.8. Once the moon set I started capturing Deep Space Images with my D850. It was a busy but very fun night.

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[Ben Egbert]

This is a neat one Jim. I love the light on the hoodoos while the moon was still up. I see it went very dark after the moon set, but then it got a bit brighter after a while. What do you ascribe that too? I am interested because I would like to be able to get printable MW's

 

[JimFox]

This is a neat one Jim. I love the light on the hoodoos while the moon was still up. I see it went very dark after the moon set, but then it got a bit brighter after a while. What do you ascribe that too? I am interested because I would like to be able to get printable MW's

Thanks so much Ben! As you know the difference in light between when the moon is up and when it has set is quite a bit. When the moon was up I was exposing at ISO 1600, f2 and 25 secs. Once the moon set it got so dark I had to up there ISO to 3200. I put a transition in so it wouldn’t be totally abrupt. As photographers we will notice the light changed and ask why, but I hoping the non photographer viewer will just think the change in light was part of the moon setting.

As you know, ideally I would have been abk to do this 4 or 5 days earlier when the moon was much smaller, and then the change of light would be virtually undetectable.

 

[Ben Egbert]

I think the conditions that allowed ISO1600 f2, were perfect. I am willing to have a less dramatic MW in return for a brighter foreground.

 

[JimFox]

I think the conditions that allowed ISO1600 f2, were perfect. I am willing to have a less dramatic MW in return for a brighter foreground.

If you are going for a single image it’s easy then because for a single image you can process the sky separately.

 

[AlanLichty]

I liked the time-lapse up until the moon had set and you changed the exposure. I found the noise levels in the sky quite distracting with the higher ISO right after roughly the one minute mark.

 

[BlackRockArt]

This is from last week, there was a moon up that set during the night and a few clouds rolled in. It all made for an exciting night with the goblins.

This was captured on the Nikon D810 Sigma 14mm f1.8. Once the moon set I started capturing Deep Space Images with my D850. It was a busy but very fun night.

All comments are welcome,

Jim

Jim. Beautiful timelapse, love it, I had the Bigma 14mm for two years, it's a bright UWA lens, just damn heavy.

I don't know how close you were to the goblins, depending on the scale & spread, it's possible to use Low-Level Lighting to get a cleaner foreground.

Personally, I have a love-hate reaction to the LLL method: when it's done thoughtfully, the foreground objects can be very natural; if it's over-cooked, the viewers get confused to question the credibility.

Oliver

 

[JimFox]

I liked the time-lapse up until the moon had set and you changed the exposure. I found the noise levels in the sky quite distracting with the higher ISO right after roughly the one minute mark.

Gotcha Alan. I didn't see any noise level increase, it looks the same in the raw files. It could be from the video end of it.

 

[JimFox]

Jim. Beautiful timelapse, love it, I had the Bigma 14mm for two years, it's a bright UWA lens, just damn heavy.

I don't know how close you were to the goblins, depending on the scale & spread, it's possible to use Low-Level Lighting to get a cleaner foreground.

Personally, I have a love-hate reaction to the LLL method: when it's done thoughtfully, the foreground objects can be very natural; if it's over-cooked, the viewers get confused to question the credibility.

Oliver

Hey Oliver,

Thanks so much and I am glad you enjoyed it!

Moonlight is my preference for my LLL. When I am just doing some single shot night images, I will at times use some Low level lighting. So I am not opposed to it, I just prefer to use the moon. And your point is right on, when I do use LLL, it has to look natural. I don't want it to look like someone is shining a flashlight on my scene. So when I am doing timelapses and when I do them, I do them almost always from sunset to sunrise, so I don't really like using any LLL for all night long. One, I don't like drawing attention to where I have my camera gear since I am not always standing right next to it. In most cases while I have my cameras going for timelapses, I also have a camera set up on star tracker shooting galaxies or nebulas. And I am very conscious of causing issues in other peoples photos. Now in this case, I was the only person out there, but you never know.

I hope somewhere in there my thoughts on LLL came out.