Three hours of fireflies and star trails in a grassy field near Conkles Hollow in Hocking County, Ohio. A stack of 300 images taken with a Nikon D7100. 50mm F/1.4. ISO 800.
Critique the Community
Submit Your Most Unique Photo
Submission Deadline: Sun, 05 Jan 20 18:00:00 +0000
This contest has ended.
Voting is closed.
Congratulations to the winners!
I think having the camera at grass level is much more unique than the other photo.
Dan Seefeldt, the grass was about 2 feet tall, so there are a few errant firefly streaks that showed up in front of it (at the bottom of the image). I thought about cloning out some of the errant streaks to more graphically emphasize the play of of light at the top of the grass. Do you think this would improve things?
Talk about unique - nice work! Very interesting. Very creative. Maybe just crop up from the bottom half or two-thirds of the way to the light at the top of the grass rather than retouching. I don't think all the black at the bottom helps but a little black with flecks of light would be good.
very unique with the fire flies! would love to shoot something like it. Love the ones in the tops of the trees..
I do find the bigger streaks of them in the front a bit distracting though. Maybe having the camera slightly higher to get more of a downward view on the flies would remove those a little?
Thanks for the input. This is an additive stack of around 300 images (with a few cut out because of car headlights from an adjacent road marring the view). It would not be difficult to clone out the larger streaks in the individual frames. I've weighed doing this, but decided against it to give the image some depth.
I will try it now to see if it helps.
I'm interested not just in the quality of the image, but in capturing a natural phenomenon. I ended up liking the ability to see the multiple flashes that each illumination was made up of. This is a phenomenon that I was not aware of when shooting the image. (This was my first attempt at this sort of image, done in 2015.) Over the last few years, as I've been doing this more and more, I've found that there are different sorts of flashes at different times. Compare this image to the other one I uploaded, and you'll see the individual streaks are different.