Last month I received an overseas communique(text message) from a Flickr friend inquiring about my whereabouts on a Thursday night.

It was my buddy Ralf Rohner otherwise known on Flickr as Skypointer.

The astronomer turned nightscaper was to be in-town looking for something to shoot, so last Thursday I took the night off and met up with what I used to call a Flickr friend, but I think Ralf is much more than that now.

An airline pilot by day and amazing photographer by night, that guy is crazy quick and had his tracker setup before I even acquired my first exposure.

As we scouted our composition and waited for the moon to set below the horizon we talked about the possibly of combining a moonburst into a nightscape with a Milky Way sky. We still had a while to wait until astronomical twilight so why not snap a few as the moon dipped below the horizon and see what we get.

Here's the resulting photo taken on a distant planet. :-)

This is a single exposure, at f2.8 lit using two LED panels on light stands using the Low Level Lighting technique.

www.lowlevellighting.org/

I'm so happy to announce that I have been ask to return as a guest speaker at the Nightscape Photography Conference in Kanab, Utah on May 20th-23rd 2020.

Click the link below to book your seat today before it's all sold out!!

nightscaper.weebly.com/

Thanks for taking the time to take a look at my photos, I am always thankful for your views, comments, faves, and support, they are greatly appreciated!! Have a great day my friends!! :)

Always Respect Mother Nature And Your Fellow Man, So:

****TreadLightly>LeaveNoTrace> PackItIn/PackItOut****

To find out more about the "Adventure Photography Network" click the link below.

ericgphotodude.wixsite.com/adventure

Please do me a favor and follow me on my other social sites found below:

500px | Facebook | Flickr | Google+ | Instagram | Youtube

Copyright 2019©Eric Gail

I haven't posted a shot from the beach in a long time so i thought this would be a great departure from my normal faire.

Here's how i decide what photo to post next and to also keep in touch with the ever growing body of unpublished photos that i have taken. What I like to do is make a folder on my desktop, then put all of my finished photos into it, let's just call it the hopper, or as Erin Babnik calls it the marination folder. Then I set my computer to use that folder for the slideshow function and then set the screensaver to activate when I move the cursor into the lower right corner. Now all I have to do is move the mouse to the lower corner to see my ready to publish photos or ready to be reedited in some cases, Haha.

I'm having better luck posting lately, so here's one from the archives. Taken during a brilliant sunset in August 2016.

I originally had planned to do a long exposure of this spot but after reviewing the results decided to capture the action with a faster shutter speed.

I'm so happy to announce that I have been ask to return as a guest speaker at the Nightscape Photography Conference in Kanab, Utah on May 20th-23rd 2020.

Click the link below to book your seat today before it's all sold out!!

nightscaper.weebly.com/

Thanks for taking the time to take a look at my photos, I am always thankful for your views, comments, faves, and support, they are greatly appreciated!! Have a great day my friends!! :)

Always Respect Mother Nature And Your Fellow Man, So:

****TreadLightly>LeaveNoTrace> PackItIn/PackItOut****

To find out more about the "Adventure Photography Network" click the link below.

ericgphotodude.wixsite.com/adventure

Please do me a favor and follow me on my other social sites found below:

500px | Facebook | Flickr | Google+ | Instagram | Youtube

Copyright 2019©Eric Gail

Moon Composite

One of my favorite image processors in the photog community is Ryan Dyar. In some of his photos there are these Dr. Suess's looking flowers. I knew I would some day find myself high enough up in the Northern Hemisphere to see one.

They primarily grow at higher elevations and can be found in the springtime scattered around the pacific northwest and Canada.

I'm not sure if it's a flower or a weed but I really like the way it twists into something that resembles a bottle brush found under the sink in Whoville. I still haven't been able figure out the name of this thing is....but some have said it's called fire weed. I'm not sure if thats true.

I took this one in British Columbia with my brotog William(Bill) McIntosh otherwise fondly known as "Tenacious B"

If you know what this thing is could you please post a comment. 🙏✌️

Hope everyone's excited about next year's Nightscape Photography Conference in Kanab, Utah on May 20th-23rd 2020.

Click the link below to book your seat today before it's all sold out!!

nightscaper.weebly.com/

Thanks for taking the time to take a look at my photos, I am always thankful for your views, comments, faves, and support, they are greatly appreciated!! Have a great day my friends!! :)

Always Respect Mother Nature And Your Fellow Man, So:

****TreadLightly>LeaveNoTrace> PackItIn/PackItOut****

To find out more about the "Adventure Photography Network" click the link below.

ericgphotodude.wixsite.com/adventure

Please do me a favor and follow me on my other social sites found below:

500px | Facebook | Flickr | Google+ | Instagram | Youtube

Copyright 2019©Eric Gail

Canon 5D Mark III

EF16-35mm f/2.8L II USM @16mm

ISO 3200

f/2.8

4 x 25 Seconds

This is a 4 shot panorama.

The milky way core rides above the Watchman in Zion National Park. It is against the rules to shoot from the bridge in Zion. So I walked the river to find a nice alignment. Lighting is also not allowed in the park, So the light on the watchman is actually light pollution for the town of Springdale. The image is an exposure blend . Two images of different exposures are blended together. That way the highlights are not blown out and the shadows still get detail. This was shot last year during the Nightscaper Conference

This image is a stack of 220x30s images shot with a 18mm lens at ISO 1600.

This image represents the rotation of the Earth for more than 2 hours.

Rusty Chevy and Milky Way HomeGroenPhotography.com #Prints #MilkyWay #astrophotography #Galaxy #astronomy #cosmos #nightscaper #nightphotography #nightsky #galacticcenter #greatrift #Chevy #GroenyView

Fresh snow at the Palisades #HiFromSD #southdakotaphotographer #palisades #KingandQueenRock #MilkyWay #nightscaper #cosmos #travelsd #GroenyView

Prints at HomeGroenPhotography.com

Total 34 single shots panorama.

For several years, I’ve been contemplating this shoot. Echo Amphitheater is in northern New Mexico about 20 minutes from Abiquiu and presented me with two challenges. It is situated with its opening to the east. Most of the landscape in this image is to the south and west. It is also such an enclosed formation that I wasn’t sure it would be good for night skies. It would be late season for sure. The second obstacle? Finding time to get out when I needed to. I got out on 2 Sep this year.

I set up at dusk with my intervalometer to snap from the beginning of nautical darkness for about 3 hours. I expected the best Milky Way for imaging right at the start, but figured I should keep it running in case clouds interfered. That made for a nice time lapse movie linked at the end of this post.

This outing was the first time I was pleased with the results of low level lighting. I attended the Nightscaper conference this year and really appreciate the guidance Wayne Pinkston and Royce Bair shared about this technique. I employed two variations on what I learned from them. The first is that you can get a rough idea that you’ve got the level right by eyeballing the illumination of the landscape against the sky. My eyeball said they were about the same, and the camera agreed. Second, my lighting wasn’t quite enough to cover the scene all at once. Since I was taking images continuously for 3 hours, I just moved my light around during the shoot. Over several shots, I had the landscape coverage I was looking for—actually I mostly guessed here, trying enough variations that would give me enough to work with. This approach also let me do some filtering of the landscape with a modified version of the averaging used for sky processing.

For a timelapse, please visit www.mattdomonkosphoto.com/blog

Peace and cheers!

16 Images stacked for NR

to see in higher resolution check 500px.com/AaronGroen

prints at HomeGroenPhotography.com

HowToShootTheMilkyWay.com to read more

18 Frames Stacked

100x10s, f1.8, ISO 6400 (10 Dark frames)

Last year just before the Nightscaper Conference Wayne Pinkston and I met Peter Ensrud at the wave lottery. Wayne and Peter were both lucky enough to draw for South Coyote Butte. We spent from midnight to dawn hiking around and taking different compositions. Most of what we did was LLL except for this one that I took. Wayne was still shooting the control tower when I went over the ridge and took this image.

Night sky is 4 images stacked in Sequator. D750, 13 sec, ISO 6400, f/2.8, 17 mm

Ground is 4 images stacked in Photoshop, D750, 30 sec, ISO12800, f/2.8, 17mm

The lens was Wayne's 14-24mm Sigma Art lens that he let me borrow. Wayne promised me the lens would not disappoint. I liked it so much that I bought it from him.

Elan Valley Darksky Reserve

from Accademia Bridge (Venice). Thanks for your visit

This is my best processing.

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STACKED / PANO / BLEND

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• Full Resolution

• 422 Megapixels

• Width 19354

• Height 21821

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• File Size

• 944 MB

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This image made by total 250 frames stitched together to create this view.

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GEAR : Canon 1200D. Canon 50mm f/1.8 STM.

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EXIF:

▪Foreground - 5s, ISO 200, F4, 50mm.

▪Sky - 25x10s, ISO 6400, F1.8, 50mm. (Each panel contains 10 frames stacked for NR)

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Stitched in ICE, processed in PS.

This is the kind of scene that drove me to plunge into nightscapes and Astro photography. I have taken/composed images I’m quite pleased with, but none have so many elements as this one. I was scouting locations proximate to Kanab, Utah where I was planning to attend the Nightscaper conference. I was a little sour on Lake Powell because the easy to reach locations are kind of “meh” at least if you are familiar. I wasn’t willing to spring for a boat rental, so I wasn’t giving it much thought. Then I learned about Alstrom Point.

Reachable with some ground clearance required. I was pretty sure my Prius wouldn’t qualify and was definitely not willing to chance it. Turns out the route is passable with a Forester if you are careful—most folks had even better clearance. As the crow flies, you are not far from Page, AZ, so despite traveling more than an hour off pavement, still sitting with full cell service.

All the nights away from home on this trip were clear, but I am glad this was the last location I visited. Having the car right there also lets me use all the hardware. I was using my tracker and telescope early in the evening to do some DSO imaging while waiting for the Milky Way to rise. I kept the tracker going for this composite - 4 landscape aspect images with the sky and land shot separately, but at about the same time.

Shot with a Canon EOS Ra and a Samyang 14mm f2.8 lens. Sky: Tracked, 20 shots, ISO 1600, 30s at each azimuth. Land: Single images, fixed tripod, ISO 1600, 300s. The 20 sky images are stacked using Starry Sky Stacker (appropriate for tracked sky). I process the sky with a modified DSO workflow that pays extra attention to color faithfulness (at least compared to earlier techniques I’ve employed!) and tries to keep the histogram from being blown out in stretching. I did emphasize the saturation of the H-alpha clouds in the Milky Way. The landscape was processed mostly in Lightroom and using Nik Color Efex mostly for contrast control and to soften some of it—very grainy from the long exposures.

May you too dream beneath the desert sky.

Peace & cheers!

www.mattdomonkosphoto.com/blog

I was captivated by the wonderful colours that reflected onto the ANZ building at Docklands during sunset.

Milkyway gazing @ pegion point , Califronia

The stars and Milky Way Core rise over eerie monolithic desert stones and Joshua Trees.

Type of Image: Pano: Horizontal Multirow

Location: Joshua Tree National Park, CA, USA

See on Fluidr

To see more of my work and to buy prints visit www.jklovelacephotography.com/pages/earth

The Orion Nebula (M42) this long exposure (10 hrs) was taken using luminance and narrowband filters, my Explore Scientific ED 102 mm telescope, and a dedicated astrophotography camera in my backyard.

Prints at HomeGroenPhotography.com