Astroselfie!
Critique the Community
Night Photography
Win one of two free Fstoppers' tutorials with your best image taken in the night.
Submission Deadline: Tue, 19 Jun 18 03:45:00 +0000
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Something went wrong when focusing.
None of your two ( or three ) shots is in tack sharp focus.
The bright light spot above your silhouette puts me off for some reason ( it is fighting for attention with the milky way ).
Not sure how I feel about the dutch tilt as well.
Thanks for the comment. This is actually a single shot (although of course it's been edited). It's nigh on impossible to get complete focus over such a range of a few meters to infinity when using a lens wide open at F2. (Especially when I'm also in the frame!)
That's why for this kind of photos you do multiple exposures.
One for the foreground/ground and one for the sky ( actually, for a proper sky, you need multiple exposures of multiple kinds to get the most details possible and with the least noise possible ).
That's a subjective matter, but thanks for sharing your opinion. I understand that taking many exposures to reduce noise is a standard technique- and works wonders for DSOs, but during exposures captured over a long time the sky moves relative to the ground- and therefore any recombining, blending, averaging of photos that include a sky and foreground necessarily requires cutting away parts of foreground/ and or sky- which as a processing step is not something I can't completely agree with at present (though I may convince myself otherwise at some point!). I agree though that the resulting images can, in some cases, be stunning.
For your information, I've checked the full image at 100% on my monitor, and the stars a pretty sharp (though theres a small amount or streaking due to the 30s exposure).
You can do multiple exposures and not miss the foreground, no cropping at all if you know how to do it. Either way, I gave you some advice as a more experienced photographer, you may take it or leave it, it's not my problem, but if you can't handle the critique, you're better off this section.
Thanks for another comment! I must admit I'm rather surprised by it though. What part of my reply do you think implies that I cannot handle the critique? I put this photo on here in order to get critique- I believe thats the whole point of this section. Your original critique of my single picture included that something "went wrong" with my focussing (in two or three images), that you didn't like the light and that you aren't sure about the angle. I think that your critique was more or less fair, but I just pointed out your mistake that it was not two (or three) shots, but a single image. You then told me that I should do multiple exposures, even mentioning a "proper sky"- to which I gave a reasoned explanation as to why Im currently not sure multiple exposures of a sky in an image which includes a foreground is ethically correct (rotating the images to align the stars also rotates and blurs the foreground- and some photoshop trickery is then required to crop out parts). Well, I'm sure that as an experienced photographer you can understand that.
You take one shot of the ground and multiple of the sky.
You only align the sky images, you use the only 1 ground shot for your ground/landscape.
This is better achieved with luminosity masks to create a seamless, glitch-free mask even between tree trunks, leaves, etc.
As for your focusing, your sky isn't tack sharp either in this shot.
It's not only a matter of star trailing due to your long shutter.
But don't worry, it happens sometimes.
If you are really into shooting starscapes, get a HDMI 1080p monitor to use it as live view to manually focus on the stars.
Great thanks for the tips. I'll give it a try sometime! Could you explain how you can tell the sharpness of the focus from this low res image that uploaded? Maybe I'm missing something. Thanks for your time in trying to help!
Unless uploaded in kind of tiny dimensions ( like 320x240 pixels ) it should look sharp ( again, unless, you choose the Bicubic Smoother option when downsizing the photo in Photoshop, for landscapes, cityscapes, etc, when downsizing your photo use the Bicubic Sharper option in Export as JPEG options ).
I don't think its possible to tell how well focussed the image on the stars from the uploaded 1100x733 image. But kudos to you if you can!
The image was exported using bilinear resampling. To give you more information on the full resolution image (6000x4000. 12mm focal length, taken on an APSc camera), most stars have a ~2pixel width and are elongated perpendicular to this dimension due to movement across the sky during the exposure. Any noticeable improved focussing would therefore require stars that are 1 pixel in width on the sensor!