Utah Astrophotography
Down a Dirt Road
Over the week of the Nightscaper Conference we had a lot of interesting conversations about the social media influence on and aspects of environmental impact. There's no doubt that the mass exploitation of the "outdoors" has seen a tremendous uptick in recent years and the accessibility of hobbies like Photography has lead to a decline in the outdoors experience (not to mention the degradation and damage of a lot sensitive areas) for many people, myself included. Having said that, "we" (me included) are also part of the problem, how do we balance finding really interesting locations to shoot and trying to share our results with the social media attention that place gets, ultimately resulting in more cars, more feet, more damage to that specific area. Ultimately it comes down to just not sharing location information anymore. And so I preach this, pick a road and drive down it, chances are you'll find something interesting to take a picture of and you don't have to worry about sharing the location. Anyone can do this, we don't need to crowd out spots and throw the local area into disarray, find your own dirt road and cool location and keep that spot to yourself.
This image was a lot of work, I'm working on something that I don't think anyone else is really doing, utilizing cooled astro cameras to do landscape astrophotography. In this case an ASI533mc Pro was paired with a Voigtlander 21mm Nokton. The tricky part is the stretching of the fits files as well as the color balancing, it's difficult to get a consistent stretch from exposure to exposure and since there are no color profiles for these cameras it's difficult to get good/consistent color information. It's a work in progress and I hope I can develop it into something people might be interested in down the road. Until then, I'll continue to struggle.
14 subs went into this image, sky shots are 2 minutes at f2.5 and Gain 0, foreground shots are 2 minutes at f1.4 and gain 100.
Down a Dirt Road
Over the week of the Nightscaper Conference we had a lot of interesting conversations about the social media influence on and aspects of environmental impact. There's no doubt that the mass exploitation of the "outdoors" has seen a tremendous uptick in recent years and the accessibility of hobbies like Photography has lead to a decline in the outdoors experience (not to mention the degradation and damage of a lot sensitive areas) for many people, myself included. Having said that, "we" (me included) are also part of the problem, how do we balance finding really interesting locations to shoot and trying to share our results with the social media attention that place gets, ultimately resulting in more cars, more feet, more damage to that specific area. Ultimately it comes down to just not sharing location information anymore. And so I preach this, pick a road and drive down it, chances are you'll find something interesting to take a picture of and you don't have to worry about sharing the location. Anyone can do this, we don't need to crowd out spots and throw the local area into disarray, find your own dirt road and cool location and keep that spot to yourself.
This image was a lot of work, I'm working on something that I don't think anyone else is really doing, utilizing cooled astro cameras to do landscape astrophotography. In this case an ASI533mc Pro was paired with a Voigtlander 21mm Nokton. The tricky part is the stretching of the fits files as well as the color balancing, it's difficult to get a consistent stretch from exposure to exposure and since there are no color profiles for these cameras it's difficult to get good/consistent color information. It's a work in progress and I hope I can develop it into something people might be interested in down the road. Until then, I'll continue to struggle.
14 subs went into this image, sky shots are 2 minutes at f2.5 and Gain 0, foreground shots are 2 minutes at f1.4 and gain 100.