Tag Archives: night

Wigglegram: Milky Way over Kalaloch Beach

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milky-way

Taken back in October 2015, when I camped near Kalaloch Beach in Olympic National Park in Washington State on my Nikon D700, f/2.8 at 14mm.

There’s a lot of things I love about gifs, but one of the things is that it allows you to capture a passage of time that you just can’t with a static image. This is 5 shots, each 20 seconds, of the Milky Way as it moves through the sky over the pacific ocean, over about a period of 2 minutes.

I don’t know if I can say enough about the night sky. People often ask whether or not it actually looked like this. And it’s hard to say “well, not quite”. Sure with it being a long exposure, it captures the milky way a little more brilliantly than may be seen with the naked eye, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not actually the way it looks. There is so much of this scene that can’t be captured by just our eyes, or even captured by a photo.

Sometimes we just assume that only the things the rods and cones can detect are what is real, but there are parts of the spectrum that aren’t visible to us but are there nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, except, yes, these photos are real, and they’re spectacular.

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The Milky Way, a Shooting Star, and Mt Grinnell over Swiftcurrent Lake in Glacier National Park

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Mt Grinnell, the Milky Way, and a Shooting Star over Swiftcurrent Lake in Glacier National Park

Took this photo a month ago while camping in Glacier National Park. This is a still from a timelapse sequence I was shooting. I’ll be posting that video soon enough! In any case, I thought the lake and the reflection of the sky would be a nice foreground element, but with the water moving so much (the aptly named swift current), it does reduce the reflection quite a bit.

#52weekproject – Week 23: Mazama Village Campgrounds

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Crater Lake, Oregon

52wp-W23 Crater Lake Mazama Campground 2014-09-27

Taken Friday, September 26, 2014.

Drove into Crater Lake National Park, well after sundown. After we set up our tents, I decided to set up my cameras for some long exposure timelapses of the sky, even though I was kind of exhausted. Really wanted to do this timelapse over Crater Lake, but driving back up those switchbacks in the dark from the campground didn’t seem appealing. Unfortunately, putting off til tomorrow what could have been done that day came back to bite me, as the following night was cloudy, and windy, so unfortunately, I didn’t end up getting any starscapes over Crater Lake. Looks like I’ll have to go back out to some other time!

I did crop the photo a bit to balance the image, and cut out the truck and the light from the bathroom. And, since I did do a timelapse with this, I was also able to stack the photos into a startrails photo. Using a different method than I have before, I stacked these in photoshop, grouped them as a smart object, and set the Stack Mode to median, which I think gave a more pleasant result than I typically get (the trails usually look more jagged and noisy). I’m still learning some of the post-processing on these photos, but overall, it’s pretty solid! Let me know what you think, or if you have any tips, or tutorials to share!

Mazama Village Startrails stacked

#52weekProject: Week 5 – Freelensing Chicago

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Week 5: Freelensing Chicago

The Chicago Theater

Decided to try a little bit of free-lensing for this week right around the corner from work. Taken Monday, March 3rd, 2014.

What is free-lensing, you ask? (No, you didn’t. But I’ll tell you anyway.) Free-lensing is when you take your lens off of the body and hand hold it, so you can tilt and shift the lens to create a different plane of focus (basically a poor man’s tilt-shift lens).

I used a 50mm lens from my medium format Bronica ETRSi setup, which allows me a little more room to tilt and shift the lens without drastic vignetting, but you do end up with a softer image and some light leaks. Not sure I really dig it the final image, but you know, it’s all about trying something new!

#52weekproject: Week 4 – Getting Flashed in the Park

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Jared and Hagene

Jared and Hagene

GTFO! Going To Flipping Oregon!

Sometimes, you find yourself so irritated with your friends, that the only way to get away from them is to move just about as far away as possible. And that’s just what my friends, Jared and Hagene did. Sure, they claim it was because Hage landed this really awesome job opportunity with Nike, but one can never really be sure, you know?

Last Monday was their last night in town. They gathered some of their closest friends in Chicago (which I assume includes me, since I was there) for a low-key farewell dinner at Bricks Pizza. We enjoyed some laughs over drinks, and thin-crust pizza, and ended with some hugs, tears, and farewells. It was definitely a bittersweet farewell, as Hage has been one of my best friends for over 13 years. We’ve been friends since our time in the dorms at the University of Michigan, and she was kind enough to tolerate me and let me crash on her couch when she convinced me to take a job in Chicago a couple years ago. So, to me, I’m not really saying “farewell”, I’m just saying, “Hey, can’t wait to crash on your couch in Portland!”

Just around the corner from the restaurant was a park bench, which was basically the first thing I saw that would be suitable for them to sit on. Temps were hovering in the single digits, so I tried to make it this portrait session as quick as possible. I did my best Chris Hansen impression and asked:

“Why don’t you take a seat over there?”

They did as I asked, and got comfy as I set up my equipment. I set up my flash and lightstand with a white shoot through umbrella just to the right, and started moving quickly. I had everything set up manually; triggering the flash with some cheapo (but super reliable, yongnuo rf-602) flash triggers. So yeah, I was the flasher in the park.

The Brenizer Method

So, sure, this looks like a pretty straightforward portrait, shot strobist style. But, that’s the genius behind the whole thing. It’s not an ordinary portrait. It’s shot using a unique technique which replicates the look of large format by allowing more shallow depth of field than is capable with a full-frame camera. How is this done you ask? By taking a series of overlapping photos that can be stitched together and expanding that photo into a larger panorama. This technique is known as a bokeh panorama, or expansion, but more commonly referred to as the Brenizer Method. It’s pretty awesome.

So, I’ve known about this technique for a while, but never really put it into practice. I’ve always had trouble with getting panoramas to line up and stitch together properly, but I think that’s likely because I’m using too wide of a lens. Here, I’m using a 85mm, so I can get more shallow depth of field, but it also means there’s less distortion in the photo, which makes it easier to stitch together. I did still have to do a little filling in since I missed the bottom right corner, but I think it turned out pretty well for my first attempt.

Shot with my D800, and a total of 21 shots. I downsized each photo to a 12mp jpeg before I stitched them together (otherwise, it would have been way too big for my computer to handle). I still ended up with a 60 megapixel photo (or what would have been 180 megapixels if I hadn’t resized). And, the extra bonus is that with the larger image, the noise is reduced (or at least smaller when resized), so the image looks extra smooth.

So, yeah. Super happy with the results from this week’s project. Anybody else try this technique before?