Scott Donschikowski's picture
Average rating:
4.2 out of 5
4.2
Scott Donschikowski
San Jose, CA

Articles written by Scott Donschikowski

NASA's Webb Telescope Delivers its First Images

It has been 26 years since development started on the eventual successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. In that time, after numerous delays, cost overruns, one major redesign, and 10 billion USD, the James Webb Space Telescope has finally taken its first images.

Are Noctilucent Clouds a Climate Forewarning?

Landscape photographers have a love/hate relationship with clouds. Too many or too little in our shot can be cause for grief while trying to compose a landscape image, unless the clouds are interesting, of course, like during a storm.

AI-Powered Art Is Getting Scary Good

Machine learning and AI are quickly becoming commonplace with the tools every photographer uses. There are neural filters for Photoshop, AI enhancement tools in Luminar Neo and PortraitPro, and even programs that use AI to generate captions for photos.

Can You Use the Canon RF 800 f/11 for Astrophotography?

Wide field astrophotography is quickly becoming an established niche that is increasingly available to more hobbyist photographers with the availability of better, smaller, and cheaper tracking mounts. But the smallest galaxies, nebulae, and planets have always been prohibitively expensive to capture. Can this lens change that?

The Holy Trinity of Landscape Astro Lenses

Are you using the right lenses for landscape astrophotography? The traditional goto lens for landscape used to be a 16-35mm or thereabouts, as long as it had a maximum aperture of f/2.8, it could double for night duty.

The Astro Mount We've Been Waiting For

About a month has passed since Skywatcher officially announced the Star Adventurer GTi, the smallest and lightest purpose-built GoTo astrophotography mount. But is it actually any good?

Light Pollution Is Totally Reversible

If you’re at all interested in astronomy or astrophotography, there is no escaping the effects of light pollution. Whether that means traveling to darker skies or using post-processing to reduce gradients, we all kind of wish it wasn’t there. Right?

Skylum Team's War Stories

Many of you are likely familiar with the company Skylum. They make the ever-popular Luminar photo-editing software. Some of you may know that Skylum was founded in Ukraine, and the majority of their team resides there.

7 Tips for Better Milky Way Photos

It’s springtime, which means that for most of us around the world, the core of the Milky Way galaxy, or the “Galactic Bulge,” will be prominently visible in the night sky roughly through the end of summer.

What Exactly Is Image Stacking?

If you have ever seen images of deep space objects like nebulae and galaxies while perusing the internet today, you may have wondered why they look the way they do. I mean, it’s not all difficult to point your camera up and take pictures of the night sky. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Amazing DIY Photo Storage Server

Let's face it: as photographers, we are crazy about saving our files. I have terabytes of images and videos spanning multiple hard drives in different arrays in my studio, and it drives me nuts that it's in disarray. Maybe you’re in the same boat, looking for a better way to safely store all your important images in one place.

5 Ways to Improve Your SkyGuider Pro

So, you’ve gone out and bought an iOptron SkyGuider Pro. You’ve assembled it, read the instructions, maybe even watched a YouTube video on how to use it, and you’ve got the basics down. But you find yourself wondering if it could be better. Yes, it can be heaps better.

The Masters of Animating Classic Paintings

The works of classic painters are some of the most revered artifacts from antiquity. The Baroque style in particular exudes portrayals of dramatic light, color, and fantastic events. But for centuries, they have been relegated to two dimensions.

A Simple Way to Shoot Highly Reflective Products

Shooting products in a studio environment is not the easiest form of photography. It takes patience, knowledge of light sculpting, and clever post-processing. People also incorrectly assume that you must have a great deal invested in equipment.

Cinematic Video With a 20-Year-Old Camcorder

Are you a fan of the 4:3 aspect ratio? There's definitely something nostalgic about the nearly square framing that instantly transports me back to my childhood in the late 1980s. Aside from that, I’m overjoyed that it’s no longer in widespread use.

Create Your Own Time-Lapse Templates for Lightroom Classic

Five years ago, I made a video about creating time-lapses solely in Lightroom Classic using the Slideshow Module. It was an experiment in pushing the boundaries of what Lightroom could feasibly do, and over the years it has garnered over 175K views, which was completely unintentional, but a very welcome surprise.

The Best Budget Camera for Astrophotography

With all the fanfare this past year over the latest developments in camera technology, it's easy to get caught up in gear envy. And that's completely natural. But what if there's a better camera out there that most of us have forgotten about?

The Five Best Beginner Targets for Astrophotography

Astrophotography has become more popular than ever, in no small part due to the global pandemic, but also due to the availability of inexpensive portable tracking mounts.

How to Photograph the Comet Leonard

After all the excitement we got last year from the comet NEOWISE, it's hard to believe that right now, there's another potential naked-eye-visible comet screaming through the solar system at 158,000 miles per hour.