I went up to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains in California to shoot the Perseids Meteor shower last Saturday night. And this is just after it got dark and is one of my first shots I took. Until the clouds got a big thicker later, the meteors where powerful streaks of light in the sky.
Since it's across Owens Valley from the Eastern Sierra I was hoping the smoke from the wildfires would not be an issue, and it wasn't but I did have to deal with some light cloud cover that kept drifting through.
I do often like the look of light cloud cover at night when shooting the stars, it can add a cool sense of mystery to the shot. But they can also complicate when dealing with the White Balance as it's really hard to separate the sky from the clouds. So when I adjust the WB to go cooler as I typically like my star shot skies to be a dark blue, in this case it just wasn't going to happen as the clouds turned blue along with the sky, and being able to layer mask the clouds only wasn't happening. One thing with adjusting the WB to a cooler WB that I look to avoid is that often when adjusting the sky to a cooler blue, then the stars turn from being white to then being blue. That to me really doesn't look good, I prefer my stars to be white or very close to white.
So in this case I left the WB basically alone and went with the green and magenta of the Air Glow in the sky. This might look a bit different then I normally process, but in the end it was the closest look to what came out of the camera.
This is a single frame image, no stacking was used.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
PS. Taken with the Nikon D850 and the Sigma 14mm f1.8 at ISO 5000, 30 secs, f1.8
Since it's across Owens Valley from the Eastern Sierra I was hoping the smoke from the wildfires would not be an issue, and it wasn't but I did have to deal with some light cloud cover that kept drifting through.
I do often like the look of light cloud cover at night when shooting the stars, it can add a cool sense of mystery to the shot. But they can also complicate when dealing with the White Balance as it's really hard to separate the sky from the clouds. So when I adjust the WB to go cooler as I typically like my star shot skies to be a dark blue, in this case it just wasn't going to happen as the clouds turned blue along with the sky, and being able to layer mask the clouds only wasn't happening. One thing with adjusting the WB to a cooler WB that I look to avoid is that often when adjusting the sky to a cooler blue, then the stars turn from being white to then being blue. That to me really doesn't look good, I prefer my stars to be white or very close to white.
So in this case I left the WB basically alone and went with the green and magenta of the Air Glow in the sky. This might look a bit different then I normally process, but in the end it was the closest look to what came out of the camera.
This is a single frame image, no stacking was used.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
PS. Taken with the Nikon D850 and the Sigma 14mm f1.8 at ISO 5000, 30 secs, f1.8
It was then that I first learned about Airglow and what it was. So since then, I will leave it in place as I did here. I was going to mention the Airglow when I first wrote it, but then it slipped my mind.
