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I've shot this lighthouse on the coast of Maine numerous times at night, and on this particular night I was teaching a workshop and standing out of the way so the students could move around as they needed. I setup and just shot for fun, continuing to play with and test out the Nikon D5 at different exposure settings at night and helping the students as needed. I didn't think I'd come away with something interesting that I hadn't captured before here, but a small patch of clouds passed overhead and ending up making for a nice atmospheric touch to the scene.
The light rays coming out of the lighthouse are real, the light (as in many lighthouses) is so directional and bright that you can see this wagon-wheel type effect with your naked eye looking up at the lighthouse when it blinks.
And to answer a question I get asked all the time, the lighthouse is not blowing out the scene completely because it is a blinking light, blinking twice every 8 or 9 seconds. A constant on light would have been much more difficult to work with.
Normally I use the "star stacking" technique of shooting a bunch of exposures at a short enough shutter speed to capture pinpoint stars, usually 10 seconds x 10 exposures, and then stack & blend them in Starry Landscape Stacker (available for Mac) to get both pinpoint stars and low noise, but in this case I ended up using a single 20 second exposure because I liked the look of the clouds in the 20 second exposure vs the effective 100 seconds that 10 x 10 gave me, where the clouds streaked out very smoothly and lost their texture.
Nikon D5, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm. One shot for the sky at ISO 3200, f/2.8, 20 seconds, and one shot for the lighthouse at ISO 1600, f/5.6, 4 minutes. Following my usual workflow, the images were prepped in Lightroom, and then blended and finished with creative edits in Photoshop.
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Autumn is on its way to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Brisk mornings with mist on ponds are here, and the foliage is just starting to turn in some northern areas. This is a chilly sunrise from Saturday.
A couple inches of fresh snow from an overnight storm blankets the South End of Portsmouth, bathed in the warm light of the rising sun. I ran into the amazing Phil Cohen here on this morning last week. I barely made it out of the house in time to get here for the sunrise, and we both raced around a bit trying different angles. Always a great time shooting with Phil!
It's been constant on and off rain in Cape Breton for the past couple days, and with that has come constant on and off rainbows. I've never seen so many rainbows in such a short time!
This is a shot I've been dreaming of for at least a year now, the amazing view from Dead Horse Point State Park into the canyons of Utah with a colorful sunrise, and I was incredibly lucky to get it on my first try on Monday. The river winding through the canyons is the Colorado River. There are endless views into canyons around here, the landscape is just amazing!
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Foggy Night Panorama
Maine
Happy Earth Day! I started out Earth Day on the coast of Maine in the cold humid air photographing the Milky Way and hoping to see some meteors from the Lyrid shower, but I only saw 2 or 3 during the 90 minutes I was there (but my attention was focused on the camera for quite a bit of that time). The fog in the area made for some hazy and moody looking scenes. The diffuse single point of light seen on the horizon below the galactic center of the Milky Way is Seguin Island Lighthouse. The fog made it look like a soft glowing orb in the distance.
The orange glow in the middle of the image just above the horizon is probably coming from the Boothbay Harbor area, and the bright glow on the left side of the image is coming from the Bath and Brunswick areas.
This is a 180 degree panorama, so the boardwalk that the camera is on top of actually connects and is more or less straight, but taking the 180 degree field of view and squishing it into a 2D image causes it to look like two different paths.
The panorama consists of 9 exposures stitched in Photoshop and further edited for contrast in Photoshop and Lightroom. Adobe just released Lightroom CC that supports building panoramas inside of Lightroom, but unfortunately in my testing (at least with this panorama) the stitching in Photoshop was better. With the Lightroom stitching I ended up with some uneven and ugly noise from the stitching, the stitching didn't add noise but it didn't blend the exposures well. Photoshop however blended them without any seams.
Nikon D750, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 @ f/2.8, 25 seconds, ISO 12,800 for all 9 exposures.
#EarthDay #EarthDay2015 #Maine #MilkyWay #astrophotography #landscapeastrophotography
Hopewell Rocks #3
New Brunswick, Canada
Here's another shot from my trip to The Rocks Provincial Park on Hopewell Cape in Canada during August. I photographed a number of compositions here while the tide was coming into the Bay of Fundy, moving further and further back over the course of a few hours.
#therocks #bayoffundy #newbrunswick #canada #hopewellrocks #night #milkyway
Swallowtail Lighthouse shrouded in morning fog on Grand Manan island, part of New Brunswick, in the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. I spent two nights on this wonderful island, full of high cliffs, beaches, dulse harvesting, coffee, fresh haddock, smoked pollock, and fog. It was warm and sunny much of the time I was there, as has been the case throughout the area this summer, but I was treated to some wonderful atmospheric fog on my first morning there, and again at sunset. Driving through the dense fog for 20 minutes in the dark wasn't so great, but watching the fog roll over the Swallow's Tail point of land, hiding and revealing the lighthouse while the sun rose, was an amazing experience, and there was some nice color in the sky during sunrise (picture to come).
Snowy Quoddy
It took until the second day of spring, but I finally got in some more fresh snow photography! The winter storm that came through New England on Monday didn't do much in most areas but it left about 8 or so inches at the end of the coast of Maine. It was beautiful to see it at West Quoddy Head Light. This was taken at night a little after 8pm under a nearly full moon shining through the thinning clouds, which is why the landscape is lit up so much. The tracks in the snow are mine, I had walked down to the cliffs to take some other photos.
Cape Elizabeth, Maine
On Sunday night I met up with Moe Chen (www.moechenphotography.com) at Portland Head Lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. We were planning to shoot the Milky Way over the lighthouse, but it ended up being partly cloudy, obscuring the Milky Way. However when the moon rose at 11pm we were treated to a beautiful display, the very orange moon lit up the clouds and water, it looked like a sunrise at night!
Earlier this month we had 3 or 4 days of constant clouds and some rain. The foliage was starting to peak in northern New Hampshire when the clouds rolled in, and by the end the foliage was blazing along the Androscoggin River. This is from the evening of the last day of the long stretch of clouds, they broke up just in time for some nice soft light at sunset with a little pink in the sky, but this is my favorite shot from that evening, a little more than 5 minutes after sunset.
Autumn Milky Way Over Nichols Pond
Vermont
I recently spent a few days in Vermont with Michael Blanchette and Benjamin Williamson, chasing the amazing fall colors all over the place. The foliage was at peak color in many places and looked amazing!
Nikon D810A and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, at f/2.8 and 14mm. This is a blend of 10 images for the sky and 2 images for the foreground. The 10 images were shot at ISO 10,000 for 10 seconds each and stacked with Starry Landscape Stacker to produce a result with pinpoint stars and low noise. A single foreground shot at ISO 1600 for 15 minutes was used to capture detail in the foliage and mountains, and another shot at ISO 12,800 for 25 seconds (a "backup" shot for my sky in case the star stacking doesn't work out) was used for the reflection in the lake. The 25 second shot had a good reflection in the lake (as good as you could get with the wind) so I used just the lake from that shot.
I'm excited to announce that I will be speaking at Nikon's booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York City this month! I will be speaking for a half hour on two days - Thursday October 22nd at 4:15pm, and Friday October 23rd at 1:15pm. I will be presenting my Milky Way and aurora photography. Also on Friday the 23rd, I'll be at the Hahnemuhle Paper booth from 3-4pm giving out signed 6x9 prints.
Hopewell Rocks (August 2013) - Redux
New Brunswick, Canada
I'm going through a few of my astro photos that I'm not happy with and re-editing them, mainly fixing colors and sky edits that I'm not happy with anymore, and in this case trying to fix the foreground and sky blend. It's still not perfect but I think it's about as good as I'll get with the shots I have from here.
This shot is from August of 2013 at The Rocks Provincial Park in New Brunswick, Canada.
The Hopewell Rocks are at the top of the Bay of Fundy, and can see tide swings as much as 50 feet. They consist of dark sedimentary conglomerate and standstone rock. The tides are eroding the bottoms of the rocks faster than rain and wind erode the tops, giving them their top heavy shapes.
#HopewellRocks #NewBrunswick #Canada #BayOfFundy #MilkyWay #Astrophotoraphy
This is a shot from my June 2015 trip to Newfoundland. I have a bunch of shots from this same area on the night of the intense solar storm that reached Kp 7 or 8 (I can't remember which), and being as far north as I was with a storm that strong it was amazing! The lights danced all around me all night long. This is one of the last shots I took, before the sky became too bright due to the rising sun.
Nikon D810A, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm. One shot for the sky, ISO 6400, f/2.8, 2 seconds. One short for the foreground, ISO 1600, f/5.6, 60 seconds. Being this far north with such a strong storm I had to use pretty short shutter speeds for the sky to avoid losing detail in the dancing lights. They were moving so fast that sometimes an exposure of longer than a few seconds would result in the sky being just a wash of green.
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This is a re-edit of a shot I posted back in October. At that time I was having some trouble blending the foreground and sky images and didn't really like the result. I went back to it fresh from the start and did a completely different edit with better blending.
This is a shot that I've had in mind for over a year, and I tried to get it in fall of 2015 but I was too early at the location, the foliage was still very green, and I didn't have time to come back that fall, so it had to wait until fall of 2016. Many thanks to Ryan Knapp for joining me in the dark at this active beaver pond that is very popular with moose. I think we heard one in the dark briefly on the other side of the pond, something was breaking branches for a few seconds. The glow on the horizon is light pollution from various towns, probably including Burlington, Vermont, and everything in between.
Nikon D5 with the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 22mm and f/2.8 for all shots. I used 8 shots for the sky and water at ISO 12,800, and stacked them using Starry Landscape Stacker, available for Mac only, although you can do this technique in Photoshop but it's a pain and doesn't always work right. The 10 second exposures at 22mm produced almost pinpoint stars (I should have shot a couple seconds shorter at 22mm to get exact pinpoints), and stacking 8 images in Starry Landscape Stacker aligns the stars and averages out the noise, producing a sky and water shot that has pinpoint stars and low noise. The trees and mountain are from a single shot taken at ISO 1600, 22mm, f/2.8 for 12 minutes. That shot is then blended with the sky/water shot in Photoshop to create an image that is well exposed, sharp, and has low noise from the foreground to the stars.
You can learn more about my Milky Way editing techniques through my video tutorials for sale on my website, www.adamwoodworth.com.
Galactic Cave
This shot has been in the planning for about 2 years or so, and I finally had a chance to try it a few days ago. A lot of things needed to come together for this to work. It had to be early in the year (at the start of "Milky Way season") in order to even see the Milky Way from inside the cave, and I needed clear skies during the new moon when the tide was low enough to get in and out of the cave and still have enough time to try various angles and take all the shots I would need. All those things came together except for some clouds that obscured the lower part of the Galactic Center of the Milky Way, and it was bitterly cold and very windy, although it was calm inside the cave. I think the ambient temp was somewhere between 0F - 5F. I had to snowshoe down the hillside through the woods to the shore, then put on Microspikes to cross the ice covered rocks and carefully make my way over to and inside the cave. All in the dark, but with a headlamp of course.
Note that I won't be saying exactly where this cave is located. It's not exactly a secret, but it has been removed from guide books for good reason, it's a fairly dangerous place and you could be swimming your way out if you're not careful, and it houses a fragile environment in its tidepools. All the signs for the cave, and the railing that lead to the entrance, were removed many years ago to protect those inexperienced from getting injured or stranded.
You'll notice that there's a lot of color in the sky, there's orange light from light pollution from towns up the coast, there's some green from airglow, and the reddish color might also be airglow.
Nikon D800E with Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 17mm. Like most of my night photos, this is a blend of multiple exposures to get the scene in focus and exposed from the foreground to the stars. Technically 13 exposures were used to create this final image. 10 exposures of 10 seconds each at ISO 6400 were used for star stacking of the sky. Those exposures were blended using Starry Landscape Stacker for Mac. Then 3 other exposures were used for the foreground at ISO 1600 and at different focus distances, f-stops, and exposures lengths.
To learn more about how I edit my landscape astrophotography images check out my video tutorial: www.adamwoodworth.com/video-tutorials
Holiday Lights and Sunrise at Nubble Light
Happy Holidays from Nubble Light in Maine! This is from Monday's sunrise, which was a spectacular show! Amazing color in the sky and the waves were incredible. I ran into John McCarthy here and we had a blast. Happy Holidays everyone!
Seguin Island Lighthouse
Maine
A huge thanks goes out to Jon Secord of J Secord Photography for organizing a trip out to Seguin Island last Friday to shoot the lighthouse at night. We were out there from 5pm Friday to 8am Saturday, and photographed from about 10pm to 3am. Thanks so much Jon, this was an amazing trip!
Seguin Island is about 2.5 miles off the mouth of the Kennebec River on the coast of Maine, near Phippsburg. The lighthouse was commissioned by George Washington in 1795, although the current lighthouse and keepers quarters were built in 1857.
You probably noticed the green and orange lens flare hovering above the bush in the right-center of the frame. I normally remove lens flare as much as possible, but since this flare is in the sky and amongst light beams it's quite a bit harder to remove. I did tame it a little bit, but I also think it might add a little "pop" to the image...or maybe I'll try harder to fix it later...
#maine #seguinisland #lighthouse #milkyway #night #stars #photography #astrophotography
Milky Way Cove #2
This is a photo that I've been meaning to process for a while now, taken during my trip to the end of the coast of Maine (and Canada) back in August. This is at West Quoddy Head in Maine. The light on the cliff is from West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, just up the coast. The green and magenta/purple bands of color in the sky are airglow (light emitted from various reactions going on in the upper atmosphere, not aurora). While I was photographing here the waves were crashing pretty wild and hard on the rocks in the foreground. The very long exposure for the foreground (8 minutes, the sky is 25 seconds) caused the water to smooth out and look very soft, but in reality it was very choppy and pretty fun to listen to and watch the waves.
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#milkyway #stars #maine #airglow #astrophotography
I still have a few photos I've been meaning to edit from last fall in Vermont, which was absolutely intense at peak color! I'm looking forward to see what is in store for this fall in the next couple weeks or so.
East Corinth
Vermont
Early morning at another beautiful village in Vermont, during my recent trip around the northern part of the state. I met Michael Blanchette Photography here in the morning, what a beautiful spot. The "mist" in the photo is actually smoke from a chimney on a house just out of frame.
Milky Way Cove
Lubec, Maine
This shot is from the rugged coast of Quoddy Head State Park in Lubec, part of the Bold Coast of Maine. This area has the lowest amount of light pollution that I've ever experienced. There is virtually no light pollution except for the on/off beam of West Quoddy Head Lighthouse (which is lighting up the cliff on the right of this image) and a lighthouse on Grand Manan island (the white dot left of center next to the tree in this image). The Milky Way was so intensely bright that you could see it reflected in the ocean with the naked eye. You can also see airglow in this image, the green and magenta stripes in the sky.
Glowing Coast
Big thanks to Benjamin M. Williamson Photography for the heads up on the bioluminescence along the cliffs of Acadia National Park in Maine! After spending the weekend at the end of the coast of Maine, I finished out the trip by stopping by Acadia on Monday to see the sight with my own eyes. It was absolutely incredible! While the glow in the photo is brighter and much more blue than it was in person due to the limitations of human vision, and the fact that that camera can see more with long exposures, it was still intense to see in person and the photo doesn’t do the experience justice. The blue light is real, and is just about how my camera captured it, I didn’t do anything to boost the blue. My night vision was adapted enough to see the bright glow in the water as the waves washed over rocks, exciting the microorganisms in the water. For more detailed information on bioluminescence please check out Ben’s Facebook page and his photo from the same spot, he has a comment that explains bioluminescence emitted from dinoflagellates.
This is a blend of 10 exposures for the sky and 2 foreground exposures. 10 shots for the sky were each taken at ISO 10,000, 10 seconds, f/2.8, and then stacked with Starry Landscape Stacker for pinpoint stars and low noise. The 2 foreground exposures were taken at lower ISO and longer shutter speeds for a cleaner foreground, 1 at ISO 1600 for 20 minutes and another at ISO 6400 for 2 minutes, both at f/2.8. The exposures were then blended in Photoshop to create a single image with low noise and sharp focus. All shots were taken with the Nikon D810A and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 14mm.
To learn more about my Milky Way photography editing techniques check out my written tutorials and videos on my website, www.adamwoodworth.com.
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#Maine #Acadia #bioluminescence #MilkyWay #photography #LandscapeAstrophotography #night #stars #AdamWoodworthPhotography
Swallowtail Lighthouse shrouded in morning fog on Grand Manan island, part of New Brunswick, in the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. I spent two nights on this wonderful island, full of high cliffs, beaches, dulse harvesting, coffee, fresh haddock, smoked pollock, and fog. It was warm and sunny much of the time I was there, as has been the case throughout the area this summer, but I was treated to some wonderful atmospheric fog on my first morning there, and again at sunset. Driving through the dense fog for 20 minutes in the dark wasn't so great, but watching the fog roll over the Swallow's Tail point of land, hiding and revealing the lighthouse while the sun rose, was an amazing experience.
This is a panorama from Friday night on the coast of Maine while I was out with a private workshop client. This is a nearly 270 degree panorama. I'm really glad I picked up a nodal slide recently, it makes the stitching of panoramas much more reliable. Without it you have parallax from one frame to the next and the stitching doesn't work as well, especially when there are strong foreground elements.
There's lots of white and orange light pollution visible near the horizon, and some faint green airglow.
Nikon D750, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm and f/2.8. Stitch of 8 exposures at ISO 10,000, 25 seconds each. The raw exposures were prepped in Lightroom, and stitched and further edited for contrast in Photoshop.
#MilkyWay #Maine #panorama #astrophotography #landscapeastrophotography
Doubletop Mountain is one of my favorite mountains in Maine, with it's jagged peaks and sharp slopes, it's a rare sight in New England. I tried shooting this spot last fall with Matt Milone at sunrise, but we were too early for the foliage. After spending a couple weeks in northern New Hampshire this fall, I headed over to this spot in Maine for sunset a few days ago, knowing that the foliage was peaking and hopefully still in tact with the winds we had that day. I thought it was going to be a clear sunset, but some clouds were around and really made for some nice light and texture in the sky.
Since the wind was blowing the trees around, this is a blend of two exposures in order to get mostly sharp trees and smooth water in one image. Nikon D810 with Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens @ 50mm and f/11. One shot at ISO 400 @ 1/4 second for everything but the water, and another shot at ISO 31 (low boost on the D810) @ 3 seconds for the water.
Cape Neddick, Maine
It's Milky Way time again! In the northern hemisphere the Milky Way is now visible above the horizon late in the night for a little while before the sun gets too close to the horizon to wash it out. Thanks to Moe Chen Photography (Flickr ID moechen) for reminding me that it's visible now. I wish I had gone out soon after the blizzard to get more snow on the island, but the next clear night wasn't for a few nights later and most of the snow was gone from the island by then.
I've been sitting on this photo for a while, but I finally got around to editing it. This was taken last autumn in northern New Hampshire. It was quite dark here, although you can see some light pollution, the orange glow on the horizon, from Berlin. It was very quiet here except for the occasional cackle of coyotes in the distance.
The green color in the left part of the sky is from airglow, a natural phenomenon that occurs in the upper atmosphere. Airglow is the result of various chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere that emit light, and on some nights it's much more active than others in certain areas. It's very difficult to see airglow with the naked eye, but the camera has no problem capturing the dim light in a long exposure.
Nikon D5 with the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art lens. This shot is a blend of 10 total images, 9 for the sky and water, and 1 for the trees. 9 exposures of the sky were taken at f/2.0, ISO 12,800, 3 seconds each and then stacked with Starry Landscape Stacker, available for Mac only (although you can do this technique in Photoshop but it's a pain and doesn't always work right). The 3 second exposure at 50mm produced pinpoint stars, and stacking 9 images in Starry Landscape Stacker aligns the stars and averages out the noise, producing a sky and water shot that has pinpoint stars and low noise. The trees are from a single shot taken at ISO 1600, f/1.4, for 4 minutes. That shot is then blended with the sky/water shot in Photoshop to create an image that is well exposed, sharp, and has low noise from the foreground to the stars.
I used f/2 on the Sigma Art 50mm lens for the star shots because shooting at f/1.4 produces some softness and coma distortion of the stars in the corners, so stopping the lens down a bit improves that.
You can learn more about my Milky Way editing techniques through my video tutorials for sale on my website, www.adamwoodworth.com.
Moonrise Over Whaleback Lighthouse
I was joined by Phil Cohen on a recent evening as we attempted to get the full moon rising behind Whaleback Light. The moon was rising too early for it to be very visible initially, but as the sun set the moon took on the wonderful glow we'd hoped for and rose above the haze on the horizon. It was a great moonrise!
Autumn Aurora Over Mt. Katahdin
Maine
This is one of those shots that I've been dreaming about getting and I was lucky enough to have it all come together on Wednesday night! Matt Milone of Nightmute Photography and myself spent a few days exploring areas in and around Baxter State Park in Maine, and what a way to wrap up the trip with an amazing display of the Northern Lights! The autumn colors are finally starting to come along, and we were lucky that there was some good color along the river here, we got a break in the wind to get some nice reflections, and the sky cleared out just in time for a good flare up of the aurora. Sometimes nature brings it all together!
Due to the limitations of human vision in low light we couldn't see the aurora like this with our eyes, but we could see bright areas without color, and occasionally we could see bright spikes, and for a few minutes the sky shimmered and that was amazing! The camera has no such color limitations in the dark and long exposures bring out all the detail and color.
Nikon D810A, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. This is a blend of 3 exposures, one for the sky at ISO 12,800, 6 seconds, f/2.8. One of the foreground exposures was at f/2.8, ISO 1600, for 15 minutes, and another was at f/4, ISO 1600, for 20 minutes. These foreground exposures were used to get detail in the trees and mountain. The aurora was moving so fast that I had to use a relatively quick shutter speed for the sky, 6 seconds was about as much as I could do without blurring the aurora too much and losing detail in the spikes and curtains.
Milky Way On The Rocks
Hopewell Rocks
The Rocks Provincial Park, Hopewell Cape, New Brunswick, Canada
While sitting in a cafe in Lubec, Maine, my friend was searching online and discovered Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick. Neither of us had heard of it before but we knew we had to go as soon as we saw the photos from there. The next day we were in Machias, Maine, after a night on the Cutler Coast, and after breakfast we headed up to Hopewell Rocks, about a 4 hour drive away (if you don't stop).
The Hopewell Rocks are at the top of the Bay of Fundy, and can see tide swings as much as 50 feet. They consist of dark sedimentary conglomerate and standstone rock. The tides are eroding the bottoms of the rocks faster than rain and wind erode the tops, giving them their top heavy shapes.
For a few years now I've been trying to get the full moon rising right behind Whaleback Light, creating a silhouette, but every time I tried there were clouds on the horizon that hid the moon until it rose higher in the sky. But I was finally able to get the shot last night, during the closest approach of the moon to earth in 69 years.
The moon looks orange when it rises at night for the same reason the sun looks orange when it rises - the sunlight reflected off the moon shines through a lot more atmosphere before it hits your eye when the moon is low on the horizon, scattering the colors that make up the white light and leaving the red/orange light to reach your eye. The moon also looks distorted because of the atmospheric haze, almost looking like it has deflated on the horizon until it reaches far enough up into the sky to shine through less atmosphere.
When I saw Jerry Monkman's photos of the view from North Percy Peak a couple years ago I knew I had to go check out the view for myself. With shapely rolling hills and the Presidential Range in the distance, it seemed like a magical scene, and I wasn't disappointed yesterday evening and this morning with a carpet of golden autumn color covering much of the hills and valleys. I hiked up in the afternoon and photographed the amazing evening light as the sun set. Knowing that there was a very good chance the valleys would fill with fog overnight due to the warm sunny day and coming cold night, I hung around on the summit until morning and my wish came true. Stay tuned for photos of the morning misty scenes!
Galactic Lighthouse
Portland Head Lighthouse, Maine
This is a shot from last month that I finally had a chance to edit together, and it took me about 3 hours to work on this tonight. I get asked how long it takes to work on my photos a lot, and this one took about 3 hours of editing to do the RAW prep, star stacking, blending, and final edits. My panorama from here was shot the same night a little after I shot this scene. This was taken as the tide was coming in and I was gambling that I could get all the shots I wanted for the sky and foreground before the tide was too high. I had to step away and watch the waves wash over the feet of the tripod, and then eventually my own feet and that's when I knew it was time to move. It was quite an experience being down here at night watching and hearing the waves crash.
Nikon D800E with the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm. This final image is made up of 11 exposures, 10 for the sky at ISO 5000, f/2.8, for 10 seconds each, and 1 for the foreground at ISO 1600, f/8, for 4 minutes. The sky exposures were stacked with Starry Landscape Stacker for the Mac to get pinpoint stars and lower noise in the sky via the stacking and averaging process, and then the resulting image was blended with the foreground exposure in Photoshop. Other edits were then made in Photoshop to adjust noise, sharpening, contrast, and color, bringing out detail in the Milky Way.
#PortlandHeadLight #Lighthouse #Maine #MilkyWay #Astrophotography #LandscapeAstrophotography
Galactic Cliffs
A few weeks ago I held a small group workshop in Acadia, and while one of my attendees was shooting a panorama on Boulder Beach, I tried out my new Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art lens aimed at Otter Cliffs. This lens is amazingly sharp even at f/1.4, and coma distortion of the stars in the corners and edges isn't terrible at f/1.4 but it is better at f/2. But to get the most light in I stuck with f/1.4 and decided to live with the "flying saucer" effect that it causes to the brighter stars near the edge of the frame. As far as I can tell, this 50mm lens has the least amount of coma distortion on the market at f/1.4. With 50mm you get star trails pretty fast, so I limited my exposures to 3 seconds, and used star stacking to take multiple exposures of the sky to reduce noise in software.
This was also an accidental exercise in ETTR, exposing to the right, at a very high ISO and seeing that it was very usable. I accidentally left the ISO at 12,800 for a 4 minute foreground exposure at f/2, which blew out the sky and while the foreground looked very overexposed it was perfectly in tact without being blown out. In digital photography, the brighter the exposure, the less noise you'll have, even at high ISOs. This is just the way electronic cameras work, essentially raw files have more bits available to represent brighter tones. A very bright "overexposed" shot at ISO 12,800 can in fact have a very similar noise result as a "well exposed" (darker) shot at ISO 3200. It's all too much to explain here, but if you look up Expose To The Right, you'll learn all about the technique. In this case, I also had an ISO 3200 shot to compare to. The ISO 12,800 shot was at f/2 for 4 minutes, and the ISO 3200 shot was at f/1.4 for 2 minutes, so the 12,800 shot was a full 2 stops brighter than the 3200 shot. Comparing them side by side in Lightroom, with the 3200 shot brightened 2 stops, I can see that the 12,800 shot is just as clean as the 3200 shot, and of course it's sharper with more in focus because it was at f/2.
Nikon D810A with Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art lens. Total of 11 exposures, 10 for the sky at f/1.4, ISO 12,800, for 3 seconds each, blended with Starry Landscape Stacker on the Mac for pinpoint stars and low noise. The foreground is from a single ISO 12,800 shot at 4 minutes and f/2.
Monument Cove - First Thoughts on the Nikon D810A
This year is turning into the year where I'm knocking off shots that I had been after for a couple years, including this one at Monument Cove in Acadia National Park in Maine. And what better way to shoot it than with the Nikon D810A? Nikon has provided me with a sample D810A unit so that I can write an article for them about using the D810A for landscape astrophotography.
Note that the greenish color in the sky is from airglow, a natural phenomenon that occurs in the upper atmosphere and is easily captured on camera you're in a dark enough area and the airglow is active that night.
I've been shooting dark skies (when available) with the Nikon D810A for over a week now and my initial impressions are that this is an amazing camera for landscape astrophotography, as you'd expect given it is designed with astrophotography features. The biggest thing for me is the improved high ISO performance. To me it looks like the D810A is on par with the D750 in terms of high ISO performance. I'd say the D750 is about a stop better with noise over the D810, and the D810A seems to match that. So you're getting very good high ISO performance with a 36MP sensor and no anti-aliasing filter. I guess I'll be selling my D750!
Another nice feature is the new M* manual mode that lets you choose exposure times greater than 30 seconds. You get 60, 120, 240, 300, 600, and 900 options. If you only need those times for your long exposure foreground shots then you can get by without a remote if you enable exposure delay mode on the camera (to delay the shutter after the mirror snaps up) and gently press the shutter button on the camera. The best way is still to use a remote trigger, mirror lock-up, and electronic front curtain shutter.
The IR cut filter definitely makes nebulae pop. The sensor picks up more red tones for nebulae and there is a dramatic difference over regular cameras. It's important to remember that the natural color, that is the color that our eyes would see with a telescope, is not the increased red color with the IR filter, but it's nice to make the nebulae pop in the image.
Stay tuned for my article in the coming weeks!
This is a blend of 12 exposures, 10 star stacked for the sky and 2 foreground exposures. The sky exposures were all taken at ISO 12800 for 10 seconds each. The foreground exposures were taken at ISO 1600 for 15 minutes each using different focus points. All shots were taken with the Nikon D810A, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm and f/2.8.
#Acadia #Maine #NikonD810A #landscapeastrophotography #astrophotography
Breaking Twilight
Panorama at Portland Head Lighthouse, Maine
I'd been hoping to get a Milky Way shot at Portland Head Light for a couple of years now, but I never got out there early enough in the year to capture the Galactic Center before it was too far south for this location. I didn't have a pano in mind for this originally but as I was planning the shoot I thought I'd give it a try. I haven't tried Milky Way panoramas much, and this is is my first successful one.
You'll notice that the photo goes from dark on the right to bright on the left. The shots that make up this panorama were taken at the start of astronomical twilight, which means that the sun was approaching the horizon (but still about 90 minutes away from sunrise) and close enough that its scattered light brightens the horizon. The glow starts around the area where the sun will rise, which is why the middle-left side of the image is brighter, and then on the far left it goes into light pollution from the Portland area and gets very bright. But also, the shots took about 15 minutes, so within that time the earlier shots (I started from the right) would be darker than the later shots as the sun was getting closer to the horizon.
I took 12 vertical shots for this, from right to left, although maybe only 9 or 10 were needed to produce the final result. Each shot was at ISO 3200 for 25 seconds at f/2.8 using my Nikon D800E and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. The raw images were then prepped in Lightroom and stitched and edited in Photoshop.
#panorama #astrophotography #milkyway #landscapeastrophotography #stars #night #Maine #Portland #PortlandHeadLight #lighthouse
Just Another Milky Way - July 2015
This shot is from the first night of the workshop that I taught last July in Acadia. Actually this is from the night before the workshop actually started, but a couple students had arrived and we were out shooting on a beautiful clear night.
Nikon D810A, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm f/2.8. Blend of 3 main images, but 13 total exposures. 10 exposures at ISO 12,800 @ 10 sec each stacked and blended in Starry Landscape Stacker for Mac to get pinpoint stars with low noise in the sky. Two foreground exposures were used, both at ISO 3200 @ 8 minutes each and at different focus distances. All exposures were then blended together to get an image that has low noise and is in focus from foreground to the stars.
Milky Way Over Screw Auger Falls
Grafton Notch, Maine
I spent a couple hours photographing at Screw Auger Falls on Friday night, working towards getting this shot figured out. It was very very dark and I tried a few light painting techniques but I didn't like the way it was looking, so ultimately I did a 20 minute exposure for the foreground at ISO 1600. The sky is ISO 3200 for 25 seconds. I needed a way to keep the lens from fogging over during the long exposure, so I wrapped a wool sock around the lens barrel with chemical hand warmers in the sock to keep the lens warm, using gaff tape (something I have from my days a filmmaker) wrapped on top of the sock to keep it on the lens.
#milkyway #screwaugerfalls #maine #graftonnotch #astrophotography #waterfall
Soft light from the not-yet-risen sun colors Freshwater Lake on a recent autumn morning in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Rye, New Hampshire
Another shot from early Friday morning. This was taken about 40 minutes after the last photo I posted, around 5:15am, and even though sunrise was still over an hour away the sun was close enough to the horizon to light it up, as seen on the left side of this image. Shortly after this shot was taken there was too much light to see the Milky Way.