I got a call from a neighbor telling me there were eagles on the lakeshore. Birds are migrating and there's open water! I saw five Bald Eagles but this one was close enough for this shot.
Sony A7rII (APS-C Mode) + Sony 70-400/4.5.6 GII + LE-EA3
Dave - Love the snow shots at Bryce with the WATE. Makes me want to head up there.
Everybody - great images keep coming.
I was out today with my new Tamron SP 35/1.8 on the Sony A7RII. Here are a couple of images taken at F/11, 250th sec, ISO 200 Up til now I have been shooting everything wide open with this lens but today I decided to see what it looked like stopped down. The edges look pretty good to me. These two shots were manually focused as I wanted to control my DOF with focus peaking. I know some of you will say the images are too sharp. Personal taste and a very sharp lens. Sharp is what the desert feels like on a winter day after rain.
dbehrens wrote:
Wow! Was that half an hour wide open at f/1.1? Looks pretty good to me.
Dave
Yep, wide open f/1.1. It's not too bad at the uploaded resolution, but at 100% the sight is quite.. eh, psychedelic. All kinds of aberrations everywhere. But as I said, I'm happy with the end result. Wanted to maximize the amount of Geminids in the picture, and that's what I got.
The process itself was a bit more complicated than just exposing for half an hour.
Basically at first I took six background shots to be stitched into a slightly larger panorama. Then I pointed the camera towards Orion and left it to take 600 (!) 3.2s exposures. 3.2 second is short enough to not get any star trails (with a 50mm lens on a 12MP full-frame camera), and f/1.1 and ISO3200 makes the image pretty bright even at that short of exposure.
Afterwards I had to go through all of the 600 images by hand, pick the ones with Geminids and align them with the help of PTGui Pro (a program for stitching panoramas). After exporting the image from PTGui, I masked all the individual layers so that only the meteor strikes were visible on top of the background image.
These kind of images are quite of PITA to edit due to all of the manual labour needed, but when succeeded, the end result is so worth it..
Impressive images from everybody! Yes, keep them coming, please.
One lens that has impressed me is the Sony FE 90mm f/2.8 macro. And I haven't heard nor read about miscalibration issues or other bad things about this lens. Well, except for the initial price, that is . But if you buy this lens used, like i did, it is actually worth it. Here are two images taken with that lens.
OK I'm no astro guru and Sony is not anywhere near as known as Canon in the astro circles. That said I'm enjoying what little I can do with the Sony, little because in my area we have 55-65 clear skies a year, throw in the Moon and my work schedule (I work graveyard) and that yields precious few nights to give it ago.
Regardless this is my first 'complete' image, complete as in 15 lights and 9 darks stacked in DSS. The processing (my ability) needs a lot of work but there is no doubt the A7Rii is capable in the right hands
A7Rii + Astrotech AT 65 Tracking on Celestron Advanced VX (but no auto-guiding)
15 light frames
9 dark frames
1 minute exposure
ISO 3200
No flats
No bias
It seems there are Loxia 21 arriving everywhere in Europe, except where I want it! Nice work, René! And so many other fine pictures, from Werner, Helena, Joshua, Bob, Michiel, MedicineMan, among many others...
philber wrote:
It seems there are Loxia 21 arriving everywhere in Europe, except where I want it! Nice work, René! And so many other fine pictures, from Werner, Helena, Joshua, Bob, Michiel, MedicineMan, among many others...
ZM 35 f:1.4 on A7R II
+1
beautiful image Philippe. know this place very well.
......... Yes yesterday arrived 15:00 at home. just a few 'test shots made during shopping.
Photo taken October 4, 2015 at 3:48 PM looking across a Pond on the east side of north bound New York State Route 30 I believe near South Bay and/or Rock Island Bay of Tupper Lake. This is in in the Adirondack Mountains. Image taken with my tripod mounted A7r and my Minolta CLE MC 40mm f2 M-Rokkor lens, ISO 100, lens set to approximately f11 for 1/250 second. Processed in LR6.
. But if you buy this lens used, like i did, it is actually worth it. Here are two images taken with that lens.
