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Archive 2016 · Red Eye Express

  
 
WalterF
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Red Eye Express


Last night I left the house at 9PM to drive 5 hours away to shoot the Milkyway, I shot at 2 lighthouses and shot for the whole night. Then shot some morning shots of the lighthouse and came home. Got home at 4PM today, Red Bull and Monster Energy Drinks were my friend. Now I am to wired to sleep and had to process some images.

This is my first time shooting the Milkyway. My camera is noisy at higher ISO so I had to put quite a bit of De-noise. This image is an 8 stitch pano shot vertically. Thought I would share.

Thanks for looking, CC always appreciated.

Walt




Milkyway over Cape Hatteras Lighthouse




Apr 04, 2016 at 04:52 PM
Camperjim
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Red Eye Express


Nicely done. As an alternative you might consider cropping out the foreground building.


Apr 04, 2016 at 06:24 PM
sbeme
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Red Eye Express


Love the arc of the milky way. while the image gets less busy with Jim's suggestion, and will look quite nice, I suspect you didn't want to sacrifice the fuller arc.
Nicely done!!
Appears tilted down left.

Scott



Apr 04, 2016 at 06:28 PM
WalterF
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Red Eye Express


Camperjim wrote:
Nicely done. As an alternative you might consider cropping out the foreground building.


Thank you Jim, I had one cropped that way but lost the end of the arc.

Walt




Apr 04, 2016 at 06:35 PM
WalterF
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Red Eye Express


sbeme wrote:
Love the arc of the milky way. while the image gets less busy with Jim's suggestion, and will look quite nice, I suspect you didn't want to sacrifice the fuller arc.
Nicely done!!
Appears tilted down left.

Scott


Thank you Scott, I will look into the tilt, I am a little confused because the lighthouse looks good and the house looks verticle.

Walt



Apr 04, 2016 at 06:38 PM
RustyBug
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Red Eye Express


Take a stab at coming up with a crop. I think that as long as you have at least some of the arc left of the peak, the effect of the arc will hold up okay, while losing the detraction of the side building(s).

@ effort
@ results



Apr 04, 2016 at 08:03 PM
ben egbert
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Red Eye Express


I suspect that to get the full arc, you need to stitch images, but that seems very difficult given the movement of the stars between shots. Did you use a star stacking program? I have tried them in the past with mixed results.

Anyway, MW shots are technically challenging and I am impressed.



Apr 04, 2016 at 08:03 PM
RustyBug
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Red Eye Express


A possible crop.

Used some skew to pull it outward a touch. Added a bit more drama and toned down the bright area on the side opposite the light house. (might be a bit over-emphasized).

Just a few thoughts ... S&P to taste of course.







Apr 04, 2016 at 08:28 PM
WalterF
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Red Eye Express


RustyBug wrote:
Take a stab at coming up with a crop. I think that as long as you have at least some of the arc left of the peak, the effect of the arc will hold up okay, while losing the detraction of the side building(s).

@ effort
@ results


Thank you Kent. I still have mixed feelings about the crop, though I do see what you are going at.

Walt



Apr 04, 2016 at 08:36 PM
WalterF
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Red Eye Express


ben egbert wrote:
I suspect that to get the full arc, you need to stitch images, but that seems very difficult given the movement of the stars between shots. Did you use a star stacking program? I have tried them in the past with mixed results.

Anyway, MW shots are technically challenging and I am impressed.



Yes Ben I had to stitch 8 verticals together, each had about 30%overlap.

No special software just LR CC, I was surprised it stitched well together.

Thank you for the compliment.

Walt



Apr 04, 2016 at 08:39 PM
WalterF
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Red Eye Express


RustyBug wrote:
A possible crop.

Used some skew to pull it outward a touch. Added a bit more drama and toned down the bright area on the side opposite the light house. (might be a bit over-emphasized).

Just a few thoughts ... S&P to taste of course.


I get it might have to work on it some more after I get some sleep.

Walt



Apr 04, 2016 at 08:41 PM
RustyBug
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Red Eye Express


No hurry, no worry ... this is one that you'll take your time to get it just where you want it, even if that is days, weeks, months or years. The key point here is "where YOU want it".

Again,

Now ... get some sleep.



Apr 04, 2016 at 09:05 PM
lighthound
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Red Eye Express


For your first try I'd say you hit it out of the park Walt! Great job and well worth your efforts.

I do agree with the others on loosing the FG building as shown in Kent's very nice edit.

Although I must say I'm impressed on how well you captured such a huge range of things in sharp focus. Now I'm wondering what your settings were that allowed you to pull that off? And how did you hold it open long enough to get the MW and yet not get severe blown areas from the Lighthouse and other man made lights in the scene?

Other than the building all I can offer is to play around with your sat and WB along the MW especially the core area. You'll be amazed on how much color is actually there that we can't see with our eyes.

+1 @ taking your time and revisiting this one over a long period of time. After you print it of course. You have a ton of goodness here and if you are anything like me, you will learn little things here and there along the way and in another year you could revisit this image and process it even further with your new found knowledge. That's one of the cool things about photography IMHO. There is ALWAYS something more to learn.

Again, fantastic job Walt! I really love this shot(s).

Dave





Apr 05, 2016 at 07:51 AM
WalterF
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Red Eye Express


RustyBug wrote:
No hurry, no worry ... this is one that you'll take your time to get it just where you want it, even if that is days, weeks, months or years. The key point here is "where YOU want it".

Again,

Now ... get some sleep.


Got some sleep and reprocessing the image.

Walt

---------------------------------------------

lighthound wrote:
For your first try I'd say you hit it out of the park Walt! Great job and well worth your efforts.

I do agree with the others on loosing the FG building as shown in Kent's very nice edit.

Although I must say I'm impressed on how well you captured such a huge range of things in sharp focus. Now I'm wondering what your settings were that allowed you to pull that off? And how did you hold it open long enough to get the MW and yet not get severe blown areas from the Lighthouse and other man made
...Show more


Thank you Dave, I used a 17mm lens and 2.8 focused on infinity, I was just lucky it all fell into focus.

I exposed the best I could for the Milky Way and let the chips fall where they may.

I just can't seem to pull out a lot of color

After getting some sleep and rereading everyone's comments I reworked the image.

I just couldn't get rid of the front building it was one of the lighthouse keepers homes, it also would have cropped out the tail of the arc.

I leveled it per Scott's suggestion but this time when I merged them it came up with a slight bow, and the image doesn't have the pixels to spare vertically. One of the bummers of shooting it with a 12 meg camera.

Walt










Apr 05, 2016 at 06:46 PM
davidchicago
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Red Eye Express


Comparing the crop to your original my reaction is that without the house in the foreground, my eye is drawn into first the light and then the arc and I find it very pleasing. Almost hard to look away. Really well done! dave


Apr 05, 2016 at 11:06 PM
WalterF
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Red Eye Express


davidchicago wrote:
Comparing the crop to your original my reaction is that without the house in the foreground, my eye is drawn into first the light and then the arc and I find it very pleasing. Almost hard to look away. Really well done! dave





Thank you Dave, for your kind words.

Walt



Apr 07, 2016 at 08:10 AM
chiron
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · Red Eye Express


I do understand the impulse to eliminate the house in left foreground, but after looking at the photograph for a while, I think I actually like the house there.

What it does for me is to make the scene more natural and realistic while also eerie and beautiful and unusual. It is as though my eye wanders up the road and past the ordinary left foreground house and then goes forward into this unreal beauty, which is almost never (never?) seen with the naked eye. So the house on the left gives the picture a kind of revealing quality which ads to the experience of viewing it. The picture becomes progressively more unreal and beautiful as the eye moves into it. I like it.



Apr 07, 2016 at 08:14 AM
the888account
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · Red Eye Express


Agree with Chiron - I think it helps scale the overall image.

Cracking effort - Really well done.



Apr 07, 2016 at 12:08 PM
beavens
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · Red Eye Express


Well done, Walt! I like your latest effort.

Might look to apply some lens correction - the buildings appear to have some distortion going on.

Cheers!

Jeff



Apr 07, 2016 at 12:53 PM
WalterF
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · Red Eye Express


chiron wrote:
I do understand the impulse to eliminate the house in left foreground, but after looking at the photograph for a while, I think I actually like the house there.

What it does for me is to make the scene more natural and realistic while also eerie and beautiful and unusual. It is as though my eye wanders up the road and past the ordinary left foreground house and then goes forward into this unreal beauty, which is almost never (never?) seen with the naked eye. So the house on the left gives the picture a kind of revealing quality which
...Show more


Thank you Chiron for the kind words. The Milky Way is barely visible to the naked eye (mine at least), but the camera does something magical.

Walt



Apr 09, 2016 at 10:24 AM
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