The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Pinnacles National Park is only about a two hour drive for me. I headed down there during the Perseid Meteor Showers a couple months ago. I was hoping to luck out with some meteors to compliment the Milky Way core but, alas, no such luck. I did see several meteors, including once that was quite bright and burned for a couple seconds, but they did travel across my frame.
Technical Details
Exposure stack with one for the sky and one for the foreground. Also an additional sky frame with a mist filter and then masked in the brightest stars.
The Perseids have been a continuing disappointment for me, both photographically and visually, but I’ll keep trying.
Good result on this one. The sky is realistically subdued, with subtle but very nice detail. It has the look of just a bit of moonlight. I always have trouble getting the right exposure and tonal balance. It looks like you have good leeway for a version with a bit more contrast – purely artist’s choice. The stars have good shapes and quality in the corners, which is not the case with most lenses. I’m curious what lens, camera and focal length you are using.
You picked up very nice color in Antares, the brighter warm-colored star toward the right, and I like that you included it nicely in the frame. I’m not a lover of the blue halos around the brighter stars, but that’s artist’s choice. It’s the blue color I don’t care for – I like the halos themselves.
I think the FG is interesting and has very nice tonalities, and blends well with the sky, but for me the bottom third of it – the flat dirt-looking area below the grass – is not contributing to the scene. It might be darkened to blend with the grass above it but I think cropping it off would be a good choice.
Thank you for the in-depth critique, @Diane_Miller. Lots of things to consider.
Do you have any insight as to the blue halos? I know the mist filter creates it but I’m curious why some stars take on blue halos and others yellow. I like the various colors as it gives a bit of an otherworldly feel, but I hear you about why some might not like it.
I don’t know what a mist filter is – can you give specifics about it? I have seen some people use some sort of filter that gives blue halos like this, but I don’t know what it is. I think an online search would probably turn it up.
I wouldn’t object to an otherworldly feel, but this look doesn’t quite do it for me.
It’s a Tiffen “Pro-Mist” filter. And to answer your earlier question about gear, I’m using the Nikon Z8 with a Nikkor Z 20 f 1.8 lens. The lens does control coma quite well. Yhe Z8 has a starlight mode that amplifies the luminosity of the LCD screen so that you can actually compose live rather than taking an image and then looking at results. And it can actually autofocus on stars!
Interesting filter. And interesting what it does for stars… But for my taste, well, enough said above. Artist’s choice. There is a different one that I saw some publicity on a year or two ago, for MW images, but I don’t remember what it was. Same thing – it turned stars into blue blobs…
You have a wonderful camera and a doubly-fantastic lens! My Canon R5 also lets me AF on stars – maybe a mirrorless thing. But Canon wide-angle lenses (at least the ones I have tried, up to maybe a year ago) suck for stars. My only good one for stars is a Sigma 28mm that is from the pre-mirrorless days.
