Category Archives: Night

More on Star Trails…

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Wacousta Time Lapse Stacked

 

HAPPY (LUNAR) NEW YEAR!

A few weeks ago, I went back to visit my parents in Michigan for a weekend, and spend some quality time with them for the Lunar New Year (a.k.a. Tet). In addition to the good food, and the spending time with the parents, another one of the benefits of leaving Chicago is the ability to get away from the light pollution. Granted, it’s great living in a big city, where street lights allow you to see where you are going, and give you some feeling of security at night, but if you’re trying to look up and see the stars, it’s no bueno, as they say. All those bright lights reflect back into the sky, and diffract in the atmosphere, making it much more difficult for the already dim star light to find it’s way to our peepers (a.k.a. eyeballs). In any case, using the Photographer’s Ephemeris app, I was able to find the times of the sunset and the moonset, and then using the Star Walk app, figured out which direction to point my camera. After getting the settings dialed in, I set up my camera to manual, using a remote timer to take 99 shots. 16mm, F/5.6, 20s at ISO 1600. And just like with a RonCo rotisserie cooker, I just set it and… FORGET IT! Well, not quite, I still hung around out in the cold for about 40 minutes trying to stay warm as my camera fired away.

The eventual shots I took, converted to jpeg, and imported into Adobe Premiere Pro to turn into this 9 second timelapse (Best viewed in 1080p, fullscreen, if possible).

It’s kind of crazy how many shots you need to take to turn into a timelapse video of a respectable length.

So now, you’re probably wondering, what does this video have to do with star trails? Well, I’m glad you asked. Previously, I would shoot with low ISO, small aperture, and a long shutter speed to get the star trails. This time, I went with a different method. Taking a large number of discrete shots, and then stacking them in photoshop. There are pros and cons to each method, especially since this method takes a whole lot more effort to get the final star trail photo. I’m lookign to do a little camping this summer, so hopefully I can do some more star trail photos. That’s it for now! So, how are you doing?

OCF: Off Camera “Flash”

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Happy Belated Halloween!

I’m not sure if you are all big fans of Halloween like I am, but I love it, because it gives me the excuse to be creative and put together a funny costume.  Unfortunately, the photo I took above isn’t of me, but of my cousin, who also decided to join the superhero fun, and dress as… you guessed it, the Flash!  I’m pretty sure he copied my theme, as I dressed as another DC universe superhero, Robin.  (As seen below)

Lemme show you the costume, and I’ll be back in a Flash!

Holy Red Undies, Batman!

So, I definitely got a few cheers and laughs as I hopped from bar to bar looking for my friends.  Nothing like walking the streets of Chicago, in neon green tights!

I even got a few questions like: “Where’s Batman?!” and even one, “Nice costume, Robin Hood!” (Unfortunately, I had to correct him…)

I eventually ran into my other friends, as seen below, and had a great first Halloween in Chicago:

How about you? What did you dress up as Halloween?

I’m always curious about people’s costumes, and like to judge people based on their creativity! 😛  And, I could always use some ideas for next year!

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Old Thirty Bastards… In Vegas

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Vegas, baby, Vegas…

This past weekend, I left the city of Chicago to head to the City of Sin to celebrate the birthdays of some college friends. We crashed in a suite at the Cosmopolitan, which had a wonderful view of the strip as well as the water show at the Bellagio.

This time ’round, with it being such a quick weekend trip, there was no time to head out to Red Rock Canyon, there was only time to party.

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Stars over Montanny

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Nikon D700, 20mm f/2.8, 451s at f/13, ISO 100

Winter Roadtrip Photography…

It took 13 hrs to get from the Twin Cities to get to Ashland, Montana to visit my brother.  I had just gone out to Minnesota to go to Lutsen, MN for an annual snowboarding/ski trip with my group of friends in Minnesota, so I figured 13 hrs is much closer than the 24 hours it would have taken from Michigan.  Fortunately for me, this winter has been unusually mild, and so with no snow anywhere to be seen from Minnesota, through North Dakota, and into Montana, the drive was relatively easy.

Star Trails…

The optimal time to do star trail photos is if you are far away from civilization.  The amount of light pollution you get from being near lots of city lights makes it harder for you to see and capture the stars through the atmosphere.  Luckily for me, my brother is teaching on an Native American reservation far away from civilization and big city lights.  The nearest big city would be Billings, which is about 2 hrs away by car.  It was almost a full moon out, so I couldn’t really get any photos of the milky way, but what’s nice is that the moon lights the landscape, so as long as it’s a relatively still night (so you don’t have too many things moving, and being all blurry like bigfoot), then it works out pretty nice.  Things turned out pretty good.  I made adjustments on Lightroom, and only photoshopped out some power lines using content-aware fill, which worked well enough.

Anyway, enough talk, here are some photos:

Nikon D700, 50mm f/1.4D, 601s at f/16, ISO 200.

Overlook Saint Labre: Nikon D700, 20mm f/2.8, 20s at f/8.0, ISO 2500

The JV House: Nikon D700, 20mm f/2.8, 20s at f/8.0, ISO 2500

Also, feel free to leave any questions or comments below. 🙂

Hometown Stars…

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Went home to visit the ‘rents today, and thought I’d take some star photos.  My hometown is about 20 minutes outside of Lansing, MI, (which is to say, 20 minutes into the boonies), so there is less light pollution than the city, but it’s not completely absent.  My buddy Andrew had sent me a shot of what I think is called a star field (correct me if I’m wrong), and I figured I’d give it a shot.  The sky was clear enough, but I definitely think it’d be better if I was further away from any large light sources polluting my sky and my photos. 🙂

 


 

My first attempt trying to capture star fields. All shot with my Nikon D700, and the Nikon 20mm f/2.8 at various settings on a tripod.  It was hard trying to set the camera in the dark as well as having to focus manually, so I might have some things I want to change for next time.