Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Our Universe is so expansive it can be overwhelming to stand in the dark and feebly attempt to absorb any of it. Honestly, I don’t think we’re meant to understand it. It is exquisitely incomprehensible all the while bringing a kind of deep solace that is not easy to acquire. I can explain some of what you see here. The darker shapes within the brighter areas are star dust and gasses. Some are the remains of stars long passed and some of it will be used as new stars are born. You can also see the Andromeda Galaxy. It’s the bright spot about a third of the way in from the left, half way up. If you zoom in a bit, you can see a hint of the spiraling shape with a bright dome of light in the center. This is what our own Milky Way would look like from a planet in Andromeda. Then, there are the bright green bands that fill the entire sky. This is called airglow. It looks similar to the Northern Lights, but is causes by a chemical reaction with ultraviolet light versus the magnetically induced Aurora. The grayish band appearing just above the horizon is wildfire smoke blowing in from points west.
Really though, you don’t need to know any of that to experience the unifying power of the night sky. When we allow the majesty of the stars to pull us into their embrace, we forget about what divides us and think only of the sky and of care for each other. This is the way it ought to be. It’s not just stars that have this effect on us; The entirety of the natural world can achieve this too. When the chaos we humans bring to our planet gets you down, do yourself a favor and get out in nature. Be it a walk through a city park, a swim in the ocean, a hike up a mountain, or even watching a bird in in your own backyard tree, take the consequential time to be in that moment and relish it well. Share that moment with loved ones or complete strangers. Just as standing under the stars may feel impossible to comprehend, you will never fully understand all the humans around you, but you can marvel at the beauty and love that we are capable of, despite ourselves! Focus on that, and not on the chaos and maybe, just maybe you’ll find less chaos and more beauty in your life.
Specific Feedback
The reason I was here was to show some people from Chicago that had been following my work on Facebook what the Yellowstone Milky Way looks like. I might have chosen a more appealing foreground for myself, but this was a good dark spot with unobstructed views. Do you find the lack of foreground to be a negative? Given the orientation of the core, I was stuck with the road in at least part of the photo, so I just embraced it! I was tempted to really make the airglow brighter and “glowier” but settled on this style instead. What would you prefer?
Technical Details
I captured this scene in Yellowstone on August 2nd. Much later than this and it gets really tricky to get an arching pano since the core rises too high. This image was created by merging 16 images into a large panorama. It is 8 vertical images wide and 2 rows tall. I used a Nikon D850 with a Sigma Art 20mm 1.4 lens. The settings are as follows: ISO 6400, f/1.8, 13 seconds.
I used PTGui to create the panorama, processed in initially in Lightroom Classic CC and then sent it to Photoshop where I use an action called Ministars to reduce the appearance of all those stars. Then a pass through Topaz Denoise to sharpen things up a little bit.A few final tweaks in Lightroom and voilá, an image that reveals what is truly there even though we cant see it all with our eyes.
Critique Template
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