Wednesday Landscapes, 22 July 2020

You are invited to upload one or more of your landscape photos and, if you’d like, to accompany your image with some commentary: challenges you faced in making the image? your intent for the image? settings? post-processing decisions? why you did what you did? the place and time? or an aspect you’d like feedback on? And please feel free to ask questions of others who have posted images or to join the discussion. If you don’t feel like using words, that’s OK too—unaccompanied images (or unaccompanied words, for that matter) are also very much welcomed. As for the technicalities, the usual forum guidelines apply: files < 1 MB; image size <1000 px maximum dimension.

I decided to post this image of Neowise not because it’s a particularly good photo of the comet—there are a lot of spectacular comet photos circulating right now, and this isn’t one of ‘em. Instead, I’m posting it because I had so much fun figuring out how to make it work (I’d never tried astrophotography before). Lessons learned:

Night 1: Just because the camera says it’s in focus and the shot looks in focus on the back of the camera doesn’t mean it’s in focus.

Night 2: Autofocusing on Jupiter works. Shooting a 20-sec exposure at low ISO doesn’t. It’s impressive how much the earth rotates in 20 seconds. I did get some useable 13-sec exposures at higher ISO, but they were noisy. The session was cut short by the arrival of a fog bank.

Night 3: ISO 1600, 4s at f3.5, and a 3-exposure stack to reduce noise. I stacked foreground and sky independently, and I had to align the sky shots manually. Bingo! The second image was made using the same approach but zoomed to 135 mm, ISO 3200, 3.2s at f5.6, and stacking 4 images.

If you post a Neowise photo this week, it’d be great if you would describe your settings and approach. I’ll be trying again if the fog ever lifts, so all advice is appreciated.

Fog in morning.

Casa Pueblo is on the right. Cerro Pan d'Azucar is the hill center left.

Like Leslie, I too have been photographing the comet. Here are two taken from the hills above Idaho Falls, Idaho. I have several other photos taken under even darker skies in Teton Valley, Idaho, that I describe in the "Casual Photo Conversations" forum. My biggest difficulty with taking comet photos is that I am an "early to bed, early to rise" sort of person, so I must stay awake well past my usual bedtime to do it.

The first photo was taken at 10:04 PM MST with my Canon 5D IV, 24-105mm L lens set at 35mm, 1.0s, f:4.0, ISO 1,600. The comet is visible as a small streak to the upper right of center (with the help of some dodging in Photoshop). I could not see the comet with my naked eye at this time, or even find it with binoculars, and it was only after I downloaded the image that it appeared.

The second photo was taken at 10:45 PM MST, after the sky was much darker, using my 100mm f:2.8 Canon macro lens at f:2.8, 3.2s, ISO 3,200. You can see two tails, the larger one is due to dust ejected from the comet and the smaller and bluer one is from ionized gas. Photoshop was used to darken the background.

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Nikon D800e, Tamron 28-300 @ 38mm, f5.6, 1/125sec, ISO 400

Rocky Mountain National Park

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Like Leslie, I too have been photographing the comet. Here are two taken from the hills above Idaho Falls, Idaho. I have several other photos taken under even darker skies in Teton Valley, Idaho, that I describe in the "Casual Photo Conversations" forum. My biggest difficulty with taking comet photos is that I am an "early to bed, early to rise" sort of person, so I must stay awake well past my usual bedtime to do it.

 

The first photo was taken at 10:04 PM MST with my Canon 5D IV, 24-105mm L lens set at 35mm, 1.0s, f:4.0, ISO 1,600. The comet is visible as a small streak to the upper right of center (with the help of some dodging in Photoshop). I could not see the comet with my naked eye at this time, or even find it with binoculars, and it was only after I downloaded the image that it appeared.

 

The second photo was taken at 10:45 PM MST, after the sky was much darker, using my 100mm f:2.8 Canon macro lens at f:2.8, 3.2s, ISO 3,200. You can see two tails, the larger one is due to dust ejected from the comet and the smaller and bluer one is from ionized gas. Photoshop was used to darken the background.

 

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For me to get a decent night shot of the sky, much less of a moment, I would have to travel at least 20 miles west from my house. The light pollution in my area is typical for a large metropolitan area.

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Gamla Uppsala

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I too have been photographing the comet

Beautiful photos, Glenn, and thanks very much for the info. The fog finally lifted last night, and I was able to give it another try after the moon set (about 11:45). The comet was no longer visible without binoculars, and now it’s smaller and has a more diffuse tail. I used a 50 mm lens, ISO 3200, 3.2s at f1.8, and used a 7-image stack. The second tail turns out to have been hiding in the noise—I couldn’t see it on the individual photos, but it appeared when I used a median-based stack to remove noise. The video was very helpful—I’ll definitely be using the color blend mode trick in the future.

Crossing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge from Maryland