ilovemaui27
The Igneous Alligator
While on my recent Milky Way photography workshop with Aaron King, we had the opportunity to capture this scene up the "beach" from Thor's Well near Yachats, Oregon. Aaron was helping Jonathan get a good focus stack on this outcrop that resembled an alligator, so I took advantage of the situation to get my own focus stack.
I had to do some tricky editing on this one as I was rushing to finish up getting the distant foreground in sharp focus (which didn't happen) before the clouds that were covering the Milky Way moved off the core. I ended up using a sky frame that had more foreground detail along the horizon, edited it to match the tones of the focus stacked foreground, cropped the focus stacked foreground to overlap with the foreground from the sky frame, and then masked out the Milky Way.
For the sky, I stacked several images in Sequator, then in Photoshop I unscreened the stars using RC Astro's StarXTerminator. This gave me the opportunity to bring out more color and detail in the Milky Way using the starless layer. At the end of our time that night, I had taken a few frames with a star enhance filter, so I registered that frame to my sky stack using a piece of software called Registar. In Photoshop, I again used StarXTerminator to unscreen the stars, taking the stars layer so I could do a star reduction on it. The result is a sky with enhanced bright stars. I really like how this all came together!
Camera/lens: Nikon Z6ii (astro-modded), Sigma 28mm
Sky: Stack of five images, 10 second exposures, f/2.8, ISO 6400 combined with stack of five star enhanced images (same settings)
Foreground: focus stack of seven images, 60 second exposures, f/2.8, ISO 6400
The Igneous Alligator
While on my recent Milky Way photography workshop with Aaron King, we had the opportunity to capture this scene up the "beach" from Thor's Well near Yachats, Oregon. Aaron was helping Jonathan get a good focus stack on this outcrop that resembled an alligator, so I took advantage of the situation to get my own focus stack.
I had to do some tricky editing on this one as I was rushing to finish up getting the distant foreground in sharp focus (which didn't happen) before the clouds that were covering the Milky Way moved off the core. I ended up using a sky frame that had more foreground detail along the horizon, edited it to match the tones of the focus stacked foreground, cropped the focus stacked foreground to overlap with the foreground from the sky frame, and then masked out the Milky Way.
For the sky, I stacked several images in Sequator, then in Photoshop I unscreened the stars using RC Astro's StarXTerminator. This gave me the opportunity to bring out more color and detail in the Milky Way using the starless layer. At the end of our time that night, I had taken a few frames with a star enhance filter, so I registered that frame to my sky stack using a piece of software called Registar. In Photoshop, I again used StarXTerminator to unscreen the stars, taking the stars layer so I could do a star reduction on it. The result is a sky with enhanced bright stars. I really like how this all came together!
Camera/lens: Nikon Z6ii (astro-modded), Sigma 28mm
Sky: Stack of five images, 10 second exposures, f/2.8, ISO 6400 combined with stack of five star enhanced images (same settings)
Foreground: focus stack of seven images, 60 second exposures, f/2.8, ISO 6400