Winter Milky Way at West Quoddy Head Lighthouse
Milky Way season is here again! This was a cold night, about 13F degrees. The lawn around the lighthouse was covered in hard packed snow and ice, which made for some chilly toes!
This was my first time out with the new Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S lens, on loan from Nikon. I’ve used the original Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 F-mount lens for years on almost all of my night photos. I look forward to comparing it to this new lens. I was going to do some comparisons on this night, but I ran out of time before twilight and I had turned into a popsicle after standing on the ice for a couple hours. Stay tuned for updates.
Nikon Z 7, NIKKOR Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm, f/2.8 for all shots. Panorama created from 9 vertical images (cropped after stitching). Always take more images than you think you need for a panorama. The stitching needs room at the the ends of the panorama, or else you’ll have to crop off way more than you planned.
I used a nodal rail and the RD16-II rotator from Nodal Ninja. The nodal rail corrects parallax making stitching easier, and the rotator has click stops making it easy to pan the camera the same amount each time without turning on my headlamp. For 14mm panoramas like this, I pan the camera 30 degrees between shots, but you could probably get away with more.
The raw images were prepared in Lightroom Classic with basic edits to get them ready for stitching in PTGui, which I only started using last year. PTGui is a dedicated panorama stitching program and it’s very good. Lightroom has built-in panorama stitching but it has flaws with night photos, almost always causing some amount of seam blending issues resulting in “pinched” areas of the sky, uneven coloration and noise, duplicated areas, etc. Sometimes Lightroom works great, but more often than not I find it leaves issues that need to be fixed. Photoshop is often better, but in my experience PTGui is far better than either.
After stitching in PTGui, I did some basic adjustments in Lightroom Classic before bringing the image into Photoshop for final adjustments.
Visit my website to learn more about my photos and video tutorials: www.adamwoodworth.com
Winter Milky Way at West Quoddy Head Lighthouse
Milky Way season is here again! This was a cold night, about 13F degrees. The lawn around the lighthouse was covered in hard packed snow and ice, which made for some chilly toes!
This was my first time out with the new Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S lens, on loan from Nikon. I’ve used the original Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 F-mount lens for years on almost all of my night photos. I look forward to comparing it to this new lens. I was going to do some comparisons on this night, but I ran out of time before twilight and I had turned into a popsicle after standing on the ice for a couple hours. Stay tuned for updates.
Nikon Z 7, NIKKOR Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm, f/2.8 for all shots. Panorama created from 9 vertical images (cropped after stitching). Always take more images than you think you need for a panorama. The stitching needs room at the the ends of the panorama, or else you’ll have to crop off way more than you planned.
I used a nodal rail and the RD16-II rotator from Nodal Ninja. The nodal rail corrects parallax making stitching easier, and the rotator has click stops making it easy to pan the camera the same amount each time without turning on my headlamp. For 14mm panoramas like this, I pan the camera 30 degrees between shots, but you could probably get away with more.
The raw images were prepared in Lightroom Classic with basic edits to get them ready for stitching in PTGui, which I only started using last year. PTGui is a dedicated panorama stitching program and it’s very good. Lightroom has built-in panorama stitching but it has flaws with night photos, almost always causing some amount of seam blending issues resulting in “pinched” areas of the sky, uneven coloration and noise, duplicated areas, etc. Sometimes Lightroom works great, but more often than not I find it leaves issues that need to be fixed. Photoshop is often better, but in my experience PTGui is far better than either.
After stitching in PTGui, I did some basic adjustments in Lightroom Classic before bringing the image into Photoshop for final adjustments.
Visit my website to learn more about my photos and video tutorials: www.adamwoodworth.com