It ain't easy being green

OK, when I wrote the title of this post, I Googled it and as I expected, it was written for Kermit the Frog on Sesame Street. But did you know that this song was covered by such illustrious people as Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra? Google is your Friend!

So what this post is really about is that it isn't easy shooting stars. The key is planning.

The Stars they Come Stealing at the Close of the Day*
* from Gordon Lightfoot's "Railroad Trilogy"

Last week I spotted a post on Facebook in the "From Quarks to Quasars" group that mentioned that the "Camelopardalids" meteor shower expected  last Thursday night might be spectacular. A look at the "Clear Dark Sky" chart site (here) indicated that we might just get lucky and have a clear night so with some quick last minute plans, a few of us got together to try to capture the event. Easier said than done.

It turns out that the meteor shower wasn't that intense. I have to say, I did see quite a number of meteors in the time we were out there. Many of them were not streaks across the sky, they were just a momentary flash. I surmise that was from a small meteor that burned up almost instantly when it hit atmosphere.

Anyway, we were out from about 1 am through 4 am. I caught a grand total of ONE meteor on the camera. I saw at least a dozen.

And to top it off, this was only a test shot while I was setting up! 10 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 12,800. I was just trying to get the composition right, the camera level and pointed at the sky. I never saw this one until I got back to the computer. You can click on the picture to blow it up

I've shot stars before, as my faithful readers know. I even wrote a technical blog on how to do it here and I'm planning a workshop in a few weeks (send me an email if you're interested in the workshop). Trying to capture meteors is a whole other ball game. I've seen some outstanding photos of passels of meteors, I know they were composited together but so far I can't figure out how. And a time lapse video seems to be the way to go but that's even tougher.

One thing you need to do is focus. In the dark. On infinity. How? If you go by the marking on your lens, I guarantee you'll be wrong. And with the lens wide open and virtually no depth of field, well that's critical. How do you do it? Like this:

Send someone out in the field with a flashlight (thanks, Kathy!) Then give it a wee bit more. This is something better done the day before in the light and recorded or taped down. 

Stars and planets move in a predictable path. Well actually the Earth moves, we all know that... Want them rotating around a point? Include the North Star in your shot. Straighter lines? Shoot less wide angle. Point in another direction, preferably South. Long streaks? Take out a calculator and figure out the angle of view of your lens, divide it into 360°. The stars take 24 hours to travel through 360°, so they'd take 416 minutes to cover the full width of my 17mm FX lens (104°) so 2 hours to cover about 1/4 of the frame. Divide that by the number of degrees away from the North Star and... you see where I'm going with this? It ain't easy being green!

But meteors? We learned that the "radiant" – the direction they seem to come from – was in the constellation Camelopardalis, near the North Star. But they could appear all over the sky. So where to point the camera?

Anyway, we needed to find a dark spot. We did, but Mother Nature interfered by putting a lot of moisture in the air, so it wasn't as dark as we had hoped and there were some clouds. With a little planning, I got a few good images, without meteors, unfortunately.

Facing South, we see light pollution probably from Bobcaygeon (50 km) or Peterborough (100 km) away. This exposure was 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 800, F=17mm but I did a LOT of tweaking to get it to look like this. You can click on the picture to blow it up

Truth be told, the above image is actually a composite done in StarTrax but it only looks marginally better than a single image. Facing North, I did a more traditional composite, including the North Star:

This was a series of continuous 30 second exposures – about 40 of them – using StarStax and putting it in "Gap Filling Comet" mode. The ISO was a bit higher, at 1600, and in hindsight it shouldn't have been. The two yellow clouds are light from Carnarvon (left) and Haliburton (right). 

So was it worth it? For me, yes. I got a few good shots, learned a lot, and got to shoot with Dave and Kathy and Amanda. Here's one more image I liked:

Another test shot at ISO 12,800. You can see the mist building up in the field to the North in front of the vehicles. 

Oh by the way: we saw a number of airplanes, but best of all, we saw the International Space Station make a pass across most of the sky. It was really bright! Unfortunately, that was about 5 minutes after we had packed everything up and were getting ready to go back!

Meanwhile, back at the Whitewater...

I dropped by there yesterday, it was a nice day and I figured I'd see kayaks. Too late, I guess,  but I took out the camera and tripod anyway. I was setting up for a little slo-mo water shot (which I didn't like in the end) when a guy and his girlfriend showed up and she sat down on the rocks where I was preparing to shoot, posing for his iPhone shot. Far be it from me to pass up an opportunity like that...

A little photoshop here... just a bit of skin smoothing and hair enhancing and teeth whitening and radial filter exposure enhancement. Not much... 

But you know I'm a "rocks & trees" guy, so here she is again, with rocks & trees!

I did an HDR of the trail, then composited her in sitting on a rock. If I hadn't told you, would you have known? 

Until next time!

— 30 —

Just because it's night...

Shouldn't stop you from taking pictures. I fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV. When I woke up at 1:00 am, I decided I didn't feel like sleeping, maybe a short walk outside. When I saw what it looked like, the shadows created by the lights at the inn behind me, I went back in for my camera (and tripod!)

The light in the sky is the light pollution from Minden about 10km away. It works because there were clouds, you don't see them on a clear night. The foreground is lit by the lights from the Inn behind me but I CAF'd out my shadow and the tripod's shadow. 15 seconds at f/4 with the 12mm wide angle, ISO = 2000. I used Nik DFine to take some of the noise out of the sky.

Playing with a flashlight! Same spot, this one's a 30 second exposure. I went running around with a flashlight while the shutter was open!

I think this is my favourite. I don't know if it renders well at this small size/resolution. I tried lighting things up with the flashlight, needed several attempts because the sign was too bright. I dodged the lower right foreground and used Content-aware scaling to reduce the width of the dead black area between the sign and the tree on the right. What would have made this image would have been if a deer had stepped out on the road to the left and posed for me! As if!

This is where the light was coming from. It was a busy-ish night at the Inn but still I wonder why they keep all those lights on all night. I had to burn in the lights (too bright) and I waved the flashlight around on the beach to give it some foreground structure. Same exposure.

The trick to shooting at night: set everything up before you go out. You can't adjust much — especially focus — in the dark. I put the camera on the tripod and basically levelled it. I put the wide angle lens on, focused it almost to infinity and turned off autofocus. I attached the cable release. I set the camera to manual and started with a 15 second exposure at f/4, ISO 500. It took a couple of shots to realize that wasn't enough. I should have brought a cloth with me (or my black hat) to cover the viewfinder, especially if I wasn't staying with the camera (running around with a flashlight).

It was fun. I'm going to try it again when there's snow on the ground (too soon!).

— 30 —

Did you miss me?

After I finished the fourth Lightroom article, I had to pay some attention to other things. So I haven't posted in a while. A few things did happen in the meantime...

Note: I added this little section after the fact. I had a few calls about the Lightroom articles so I wanted to make a quick response here. The articles don't "Teach" LR. They just summarize a few of the features and pitfalls for thos contemplating getting their feet wet in LR or who are new at it and are lost. The articles are supposed to be read in order, 1 to 4, but the nature of this blog means that they're posted in reverse and in fact, the first article has fallen off the bottom. Here's what to do: click on February in the Blog Archive at right (not in the screen capture below!)  to expand it, then click on the article itself, starting with #1 at the bottom.,

It's nice to be recognized!

Remember the "Mountain Man" image? It seems that some other people liked it as well. In fact it was awarded "BEST PORTRAIT" in the Digital images category at the 2010 GTCCC (Greater Toronto Council of Camera Clubs) Interclub competition. Yesssssssssss! Several people congratulated me, and a couple of them remarked, "OK, so isn't it time you got back to doing some painting? One of them was Hilarie who taught me in the first place. I need to make the time to focus on it and I will. In fact, I have an image in mind that I'd like to work on... news at 11. Which means later. I'm going to make a larger print and get it framed. When the same image won the Richmond Hill print competition last year, I won a free picture framing. If I can still find the award (hmmm. It's somewhere in my computer room!), I'll get it properly framed for display. It's getting hard to find space to display all my award-winning shots! LOL

I wasn't the only one to win an award at the GTCCC's. Irina Popova, Lance Gitter, Fern Gitter, Bud Newton, Robert Fowler and many other RHCC members won awards as well. Hilarie, who I mentioned above, won 4 (four) awards! Including First Place overall in Digital Pictorial. Click this link to look through some really fine examples of the art of photography.

Why I don't shoot pictures for a living
Last week a business colleague/friend asked me to shoot his picture for a business card. I was dumb not to ask how he wanted to use the picture. I came to his house, spent an hour or two shooting then a couple of hours editing before I posted the pictures on Smugmug for him to select. He told me which one, so I spent a couple more hours carefully editing and preparing the picture.Then he emailed me and said, "oh by the way, I want it floating on a transparent background. So much for my careful vignetting of the background. Out comes the old "Extract" tool in Photoshop (which isn't in CS4, you have to go find and download it), and about an hour later I had the close-cut image. Less than perfect, because had I known in advance, I would have chosen a background easier to select from. Then I get, "it appears a little dark...". So I've got to have 5 or 6 hours into this picture, which I'm doing as a favour for free. That's why.

I haven't been shooting pictures.
But that doesn't mean I haven't been doing photography stuff. Sometimes planning shoots and studying other photographers can be very productive too. I ran into photographer Lyn Winans in Minden one day last week. We chatted for a while and exchanged contact information. When I got home, I surfed over to her gallery site and was very impressed with her work. About 300 images up there, and each and every one of them is tack sharp and really well composed. Many of her shots had the "wow" factor that we all strive for. I won't post her pictures, of course but have a look at her gallery. My favourite of her images is this one.

I also invited Dr. Ron to shoot the annual group picture of the Humber College instructors. In previous years, I would set up the camera and run into the picture, which was good for a laugh. But I felt I was getting stale and didn't want to shoot the same shot year after year, so I asked Ron. I gave him a guideline or two, then left it to him. I have to say that I learned a few things — Ron has vision, different from mine (notice I didn't say "better". Ron would disagree with me if I said that but I would be right and he would be wrong. So there.) Anyway, I can't post those pictures here, because they're not ready. I'm sure he'll allow it but you're just going to have to wait and see! There's also an instructor at Humber by the name of John Kerns who is a superb photoeditor so he's going to do that part of the project!

Told you I haven't been shooting.
So this is the fourth topic in the post and still no pictures. Huh. See? Would I lie to you? I shot the FAC course ID photos last weekend and proceeded to drop my flash on the floor. Now it doesn't work (surprise, surprise!). So I need a new one. SB-600 or SB-800. We'll see what I can find at a reasonable price on eBay. So I had to shoot those photos and all I had was the popup flash on the camera. Yuck, to say the least. I duct-taped the Gary Fong diffuser on top of the camera. It helped, but I got some really ugly shadows. You do what you have to do. By turning down the clarity, I got some sort-of acceptable images. So I have to fix or replace that flash quickly.
 
Here's a typical shot with the pop-up flash and diffuser. Before and after clarity adjustment.
 

I think the clarity slider is a great invention.

All right, I lied.
OK, I did go out last week and shoot some photos. However not really with the intention of creating a world-beating image, at least not now. Again, I have an idea about what I want to create and I don't know quite how to do it so I went out to practice. Here's the deal.

I told Dr. Ron that I am contemplating returning to Newfoundland again this summer. We discussed a photo expedition that I was looking into and I told him I had decided not to go with them, for a couple of reasons — first, I looked at the work of the expedition guide and I don't think he has that much to teach me. Second, it's expensive and I could do pretty well everything he was going to do for much less. I told Ron that I had a photo in mind that I wanted to take. He said, "you're going all the way to Newfoundland to get one photo? That's nuts!" This after he told me he hiked 30 miles with a 4x5 camera for 2 pictures. We both realized that this is what it can be all about.

Do you think I'm rambling? Not really, I'm leading up to something. I'm trying to tell you, dear reader, that there's nothing wrong with getting an idea in your mind then going to extremes to achieve it. I want to take a night time exposure involving the sea, some rocks and if I'm lucky, an iceberg. The iceberg thing may not work because they move, so that would screw up the time exposure thing, but I might be able to capture it separately and post-process it together. Anyway, I've got a vision of what I want to capture and a vague idea how to do it, so I have to try it before I go.

I went down to the lake at night and captured this shot of some fast water coming out of a culvert:

Nope. Didn't even come close to working. How do you focus in the dark?

While I was there, I took these so-so interesting images:

Not a forest fire – house lights through the trees

The house across the lake. Tough exposure!

Star shot. The belt of Orion.

I went to the Minden Wildwater Preserve and did some exposures with heavy duty Neutral Density filters in place. I actually managed to do a 1 minute exposure in daylight. Now we're getting somewhere, but it's not ideal. The lens was stopped WAY down to f/32 which doesn't produce the best sharpness (see an earlier post about diffraction effect. Search for "aperture") and all that extra glass on the front of the lens... but the result is getting there. I just need to know how to do this in the dark! Here's the best shot that day:

1 minute exposure at f/32, 100 ISO. I used the 24-120mm lens with an 8xND filter and a polarizer mounted for additional light reduction. As an aside, I remembered to turn off the VR but I didn't remember to turn it back on until just this minute!.

So what am I trying to tell you? By setting a goal and figuring out how to get there, I think I'm taking a step forward. It remains to be seen if I can capture that image I have in mind. I'll be disappointed if I don't but at least I'll have tried.

PS: anyone want to come to Newfoundland at the end of June? Email me.