The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This isn’t going to win any prizes, but I finally got a MW pano. It’s from the Alabama Hills and the “light painting” is from the small town of Lone Pine. I’m very surprised at the glow – the air seemed dry but probably wasn’t clean. The distant glow on the right is probably from the Mojave Desert towns of Ridgecrest and China Lake, and possibly from as far away as Mojave, Edwards AFB and then on to the Los Angeles area. The greenish tones would be from airglow, which is strong lately with the high solar activity.
Specific Feedback
All comments welcome! I should try to make the left side stronger but things faded out there. I could have waited for more darkness but then the arc would have been too high. A month or two earlier would have been better. Next year…
Technical Details
12 very overlapped frames with the camera in portrait orientation and everything as level as I could get it. About 180 degrees covered. The arc was too high to try for a FG – I had to aim up quite a bit and was concerned that the pano would stitch well, but LR handled it.
The DNG output was adjusted in LR with slight increases in Exposure, Clarity and Saturation. Then into PS for Topaz NR and some Nik Tonal Contrast. A few short airplane trails cloned out.
I like it! I wouldn’t worry too much about the sky glow - it is a part of the world we inhabit in the 21st century, and the differentiation of the near and far skylines is actually a strength of your composition. I’m glad you had decent clear skies to shoot in. From the Rockies eastward, the wildfire smoke has been so bad that the June new moon was essentially a useless period for astrophotography, even on cloud-free nights in some fo the best dark sky parks in North America! Given how uncommon non-smoky skies are in CA and the rest of the west in summer anymore, I’m glad you had good conditions.
Beautiful image. Tastefully processed. When I first started i shot Milky Way in my opinion I would over process the MW. It would be cool to see the details but too much. Today I would do it more subtle like this. I like the glow as part of the image. I think it helps to provide scale. Kind of similar to have someone stand in an image.
Jeff is right now light pollution is almost unavoidable throughout the country. Living on the east coast there are very few places you can go.
Hi Diane,
that’s a beautiful Milky Way Panorama. I am a bit jealous of your dark night sky. I don’t think we have any place in our country with so little light pollution.
Maybe I would try to let the Milky Way pop slightly more. The glow in the center of the image is quite bright and competes with the Milky Way Core.
You shot with a focal length of 28mm. Don’t you have a fast lens that has a shorter focal length? I shot all my panoramas with 16mm. You won’t have any problem shooting the Milky Way Panorama even if it is steeper than in your picture.
LR was able to successfully stitch most of my panoramas. Even if the result is not always satisfactory. PTGui offers a variety of projection methods that give good results even if you have to tilt the camera upwards. My last post of the tree here on NPN is a good example of how PTGui sometimes makes all the difference. I was standing very close to the tree and had to tilt the camera up quite a bit. The stitching in LR was successful but the result looked weird.
Lens choices are a quandary for me. I have the Canon 17mm TS-E but it is f/4 and stars in the corners are horrible wide open. But they are small in the frame and maybe would be minimized in a pano – I should get over pixel peepeing and try it. I got the Sigma 28mm f/1.4 for the good star quality in the corners, but it needs to go to f/2.8 to get rid of the worst coma, and f/4 is better. My Canon f/2.8 24-70 II is awful in the corners at 24. At 40mm, for the “heart” like the one Youssef posted recently, it isn’t bad at f/5.6. My 16-35 II f/2.8 is too bad in the corners to even think about using. Jens, what 16mm are you using? Maybe for a pano with a lot of overlap, the bad corners would be excluded. A lot of people like a 14mm Rokinon/Samyang. I should look into it – it is very affordable.
I need to look into PTGui – do you need to have very precise rotation intervals?
I’m hoping to find an opportunity this coming new moon to get to a dark site with the tracker. Weather looks promising but smoke from the fires in Canada may shoot it down. But I don’t think I can track for a panorama – just with the 28mm and maybe the 24-70 at about 40 for the “heart”. I did it several years ago with older equipment and it wasn’t too bad but I should be able to do better.
I like it Diane! So glad you got some shots down there! I’m never worried about editing the sky too brightly, since straight out of the camera is already way more than our eyes can see. I figure you might as well really show off what is up there, even if you can’t see it with your eyes! I actually love the dark silhouette of the foreground since it’s so appealingly jagged, but it would be nice to see some separation from the background mountains on the left side. Not sure if there’s enough to bring out there, but it might be work a try. I think having that line of the foreground go all the way across would really add to the image.
Thanks, @Paul_Holdorf – this one needs more work (the paint never dries) and I like your suggestions. May take a while as I’m slogging thru too many pictures from a week-long trip.
Nicely handled Diane - Nice that you intentionally kept just the right amount of real estate on oth sides - it is quite natural for the MW to fade off on the left
I would tone down the middle glow - personal taste
Foreground - if a silhouette was your intention, you did very well - wonder what a little more detail would look like here
I never really pay much attention to that. I always use the grid on the LCD screen to find out how much I should rotate the camera. But my Sony camera has quite a good feature for supporting that in night. It is called “Bright Monitoring”. When I activate that function the exposure time for the live view will be extended so that you can check your composition even in the dark.
I use the Sony 16-35 F2.8 GM. The lens isn’t perfect. There is also some coma at the edges.
My impressions have been that Sony has done a much better job with wide angle lenses than Canon.
Your Bright Monitoring sounds great! I can go to Movie Mode and crank up the ISO, but only to 51,200, not quite far enough for a good view. The newer R6 can go to ISO 204,800 for this. Both can autofocus on stars – I assume all recent mirrorless bodies can – but I have prefered to manually focus and check it on my laptop at 100% with tethered capture in LR. I need to test how good AF on stars looks that way.
Beautiful pano, Diane. It looks very nicely balanced. Just being curious, looking at your settings, it says you shot at ISO3200. Have you played with some higher ISO settings to let a bit more light in and brighten up the milkyway? I often use 6400 or 8000 if skies are super dark.
Good question, @cornelia_schulz – my thinking is that 3200 is my highest native ISO and above that the sensor is supposedly ISO-invariant, so I have the same noise staying at 3200 and raising exposure in post, and retain more dynamic range with the lower ISO. How much difference the dynamic range would make is questionable – I think the only result would be slightly better star color (less highlight blowout). But the stars are already so blown out, even at ISO 800 or below, I doubt that is worth considering.
This is a nice panoramic. The Milkyway brightness is not as bright as most Milkyway panoramics, my included from last year, Here. I used a 14-24mm f/2.8 Sigma lens at 14 mm, but I took all 7 photos at TIFFS since I could not read the D850 raw files at that time.
The closest dark sky location I go to is in Big Sur just north of Julia Pfieffer Burns State Park. It is Bortle 2 Sky. I have to contend with fog, sometimes it’s clear as a bell, and other times it starts off clear only to fog up, as it did two nights ago and snubbed my latest attempt to capture the Milkyway on 4x5. I have a few more days around the new moon to try again this month. Are you interested in meeting up there?
Thanks, @Youssef_Ismail – I do want to work on the brightness. I’m frustrated by my MW attempts so far. We’re heading to our secret dry lake bed in OR tonight for another try – skies look very good but it will be hot. It’s a desert area but at 4000 ft. Probably too late for a pano but I’ll be able to set up the tracker, for whatever good it will do for NR. PI can take the Canon raw files and I’ll try integrating in it. I’m evaluating the Canon RF 15-35 f/2.8 but prepared to not love it. We’ll see. The best Sigmas don’t come in Canon mounts.
It would be fun to get together in Big Sur some time, but after this trip I’ll probably not be up for a long drive this new moon. Good luck – keep us posted on your journey!!
