We had arrived in the Monument Valley area earlier in the afternoon. After dinner we drove out to Forest Gump Hill to shoot the sunset. We hung around until dark to shoot the Milky Way. I wanted to capture the night sky as the ancient Navajo experienced it.
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Composition and technical aspects.
Pertinent Technical Details
This is a stitched image made up of 24 individual shoots using a Nodal Ninja M2 pano head. It was shot with a Canon R5, 24-70mm Sigma F/2.8 zoom lens at 39mm. F/2.8, 15 sec., ISO 3200. Preprocessing was done using Adobe Camera RAW, stitching in PTGui Pro and final touch up in Photoshop. Finished wall mural image is 15,266 x 28,456 pixels, 434 megapixels, 50" x 94"
Impressive!! And impressively vast!! I love how the MW is rising behind the large rock formation – it’s evocative of a volcano! Airglow has created some interesting patterns that we never see at our usual “longer” focal lengths of 14-20 mm!
Does PTGui do any noise reduction? (I have yet to use it.) I haven’t found a NR method I like outside of stacking, but it would be very tedious to stack a set of each of the 24 frames while the sky marched overhead.
John, this is wonderful! I’m amazed by all of the colors and the other details in the sky. The monuments and the sense of ancient ways look good. I’m especially intrigued with the dark areas alongside the Milkyway.
John: I’ve not dabbled in astro-photography but this is compelling. The colors are fantastic and there is just enough land form to give a good sense of place. Sounds like a lot of effort went into this and the results are spectacular >=))>
PTGui does NOT have any noise reduction. As it has been some time since I did this photo, I don’t recall if I used any de-noise or not. Generally for night time photos at higher ISO’s I will use the non-AI de-noise function in Adobe Camera RAW during the preprocessing.
