View allAll Photos Tagged Alignment
From my post-rain photo walk last week. I've photographed this location before but the wet pavement looked too cool to pass up. This was with the TT Artisan 23mm
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I find it easy to imagine the people building this church, which was finished in 1903, using the line of the rising Milky Way to set the angle for their little building’s roof gable. There wouldn’t have been as much man-made dust in the air nor light pollution to dim their view back then, giving the locals an unobstructed vista of the heavens on a cloudless night.
Mind you the air was clear and the night quite dark when I visited the small sanctuary in April of 2019, evidenced by how much of the fine details in the Milky Way’s dust lanes my photo has captured. The colours of a number of the nebulae in the star-forming region of Rho Ophiuchi have also shown up nicely in the photo. Not visible in the photo, and certainly lost to my eyes on the night, is the cap for one of my lenses, dropped as I was stumbling through the darkness, looking for an interesting composition to shoot. Perhaps if I make the 400+ kilometre round-trip back there one day, I might find my piece of protective plastic still laying in the grass.
I used nine separate overlapping photos to create this composite “vertical panorama” image. My Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400, did a splendid job of sucking as much light out of the sky as possible to record each of those nine frames.
Venus, Mars, and the crescent moon align with Pigeon Point Lighthouse on the California coast.
Single exposure with only Lightroom adjustments
Sony A7S, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 @f/2.8, 200mm, 1 second, ISO12,800
More info, for the truly geeky:
I knew this alignment was coming several weeks ago and put a reminder on my calendar for the afternoon to come up with a shot for it. I knew that the planets and moon were going to be roughly 260-270 degrees as they approached the horizon and started looking at westerly foregrounds. Since the sun was well down by the time the planets and moon were going to be close to the horizon, I knew that the foreground either had to be a very strong silhouette or self-lit (like the GG Bridge, city skyline, etc). There was a possible shot from Treasure Island of the South Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, but I just didn't want to drive into the city yesterday, so kept looking.
I found that the alignment matched very well with typical shooting locations for Pigeon Point Lighthouse. I like the lighthouse, but it presents some pretty daunting challenges; fog, sea spray, moisture in the air, and the very bright lights from the hostel and the beacon itself. Nevertheless, I set out for the lighthouse around 5:00pm to give myself enough time
I knew I was going to be at 200mm (or more) for the shot, which means that I would need to keep the shutter duration at 2 seconds or less to avoid streaking the planets, stars, and surface of the moon. This requires a pretty high ISO (12,800 or more) at f/2.8 (and even higher at f/4) to be able to preserve any detail in the foreground. I decided to keep my 70-200 f/2.8 instead of adding the extender to give it more reach, but at the loss of a stop of light.
I took a bunch of test shots as the planets and moon were setting and the sky got darker and darker as the sun got further below the horizon. I settled on exposure brackets centered around 0.5s at f/2.8. Shooting 5 shots at 1eV steps, this gave me exposures from 2s down to 1/4s. I ended up using the 1s exposure. All at ISO12,800.
The moon is incredibly challenging, even when in crescent phase. The sunlit portion is WAY too many stops above anything else in the sky and on the ground. I decided to let the sunlit crescent blow out and went for details in the earthshine portion of the moon. By making this decision, I was able to use a single exposure to make the image. There is a lot of highlight and shadow recovery going on here, but the Sony A7S image holds up pretty well. There is noise, of course, but it is very well behaved.
I believe that this image would not be possible without the A7S. Keeping the stars and planets from streaking at 200mm requires very short shutter durations. This requires bumping up the ISO to 12,800 or even 25,600. The ISO performance and Dynamic Range of the sensor at these ISOs allows long-lens astro-landscape photography to become a reality (without compositing)
Light dusting of snow on top of the leaf litter serves to emphasise the undulations of the ground. Begs the question, what lies underneath to cause these depressions in the first place...
Taken from near the Alameda ferry terminal, I chose this place because from this vantage point, the Bay Bridge seems parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge (the fainter bridge in the background). I liked this picture because the container ship in alignment with the setting sun and the yacht with one of the Bay Bridge towers
At times, these icicles were quite frightening. When I wasn't careful enough, they would break and bounce off my head.
Great Falls, Hamilton
“I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.” - Rebecca Solnit
Kohler-Andrae State Park (WI)
Big news!
I've been overwhelmed with the amount of encouragement and support I've gotten from all of you lovely photography viewers over the years. Many of you told me "Brent, I want a way to support your little passion project, but I don't have the wall space or dough for a huge print! Those who reached out were generally met with something like "Maybe someday, but for now I'm too lazy/dumb to put that together."
My last post to reddit was the straw that broke the camel's back. Without further ado, I've made a Patreon page for BrentGoesOutside. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's kinda like kickstarter but with a monthly ongoing pledge. Now, if you pledge a minimum of $1/month, I'll send you a desktop or mobile wallpaper each month! I am working on other reward levels, but I wanted to offer something small to guage interest and get this thing off the ground. Let me know if you have ideas, too.
You can find my patreon page at www.patreon.com/brentgoesoutside
Whether or not you contribute financially to my photography, THANK YOU so much for all of the support. It's meant the world to me and keeps me going.
Captured: June 2016
Camera: Nikon D610
Lens: Nikon 70-200mm f/4
Settings: ISO100, 70mm, f/8, 1/250 seconds
Comments Greatly Appreciated,
Jupiter, Antares and Mars all line up across the scene while the Milky Way rises behind Delicate Arch. Delicate Arch is always the highlight for our students in our workshops. It's always fun to hike up in the dark and then back down at sunrise. If you have never experienced the night from this vantage point, I highly recommend you put it on your bucket list. Join a group, go with friends or whatever it takes. It's really a magical scene.
This image is made from 20 single exposures all stacked and aligned to create an almost noise free image.
Prints and more - darrenwhitephotography.com/featured/delicate-alignment-da...
Workshops -
www.nightphotographyworkshop.com
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Perfect Full Hunter's Moon alignment with the Lion's Lighthouse at Shoreline Village in Long Beach, CA! Taken last night on October 10, 2022. Full Moon alignment found and planned with Planit Pro, a great Photographers' Ephemeris App!
The alignment of 24 stones extends south from the circle which is 12.8m in diameter and originally had 39 stones
For the very first time, SDO observed both the Earth and the Moon block its view of the Sun at the same time (Sept. 13, 2015). First the Earth blocked out the entire Sun for an hour. When it moved aside, the Moon was also blocking a portion of the Sun. Of course, none of this was visible from Earth. Due to SDO's elliptical orbit, occasionally the Earth or the Moon blocks its view of the Sun, but this double alignment was a first. The video shows the Earth moving out of the way and revealing the Moon over a brief 10-minute period. Incidentally, the edge of the Earth looks much fuzzier than the edge of the Moon because our planet has a thick atmosphere and the Moon does not. Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA.
@ Newcastle-upon-Tyne
From a visit to Newcastle's quayside.
Taken at the point that the Tyne and Millennium bridges line up, the left side of the image also shows the Gateshead Baltic Quay.