Moonlit Mudcracks

Image Critiques Weekly Challenge
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Star Trails.jpg
Star Trails.jpg683Ă—1024 146 KB

Critique Style Requested: Standard

The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.

Description

Wow, what a night! The desert is a magical place, and to experience it alone during a moonlit walk was surreal. I spent the evening scouting out the perfect formation of cracks, then waited several hours, camera in place, waiting for the sun to set and moon to rise to the perfect location to cast light onto the cracks.

On this night and the following (which was spent as a midnight walk through the sand dunes), the air was completely still, with only an occasional gentle breeze, producing an eerie stillness and quietness I have experienced nowhere else. During my over 6-hour adventure making this photograph, I was visited by a fox who approached and sat and looked at me for several minutes, barely out of arm’s reach, examining my backpack and other camera/tripod that was setup. He trotted off and returned several times over about a 30-minute period, as curious about what I was doing as I was curious how his footsteps were so silent that I never heard him make a single sound.

The moon was full, making the exposure of the foreground as bright as daylight, and providing a blue hue to the sky as if it were daytime. I had pre-visualized this image as a B&W or at least very desaturated since the full moon would make it too bright and colorful for a night image. Going full B&W accentuated the mud cracks, creating leading lines to draw the viewer’s eyes in towards the mountains and up to the star trails.

Specific Feedback

I would have liked to bring out slightly more contrast in the sky to make the star trails pop a bit. The sky is bright from the illumination from the full moon, leading to the reduced contrast, but I think I like the balance I found. Any darker made it look unnatural due to how bright the foreground is.

The other item I tried to fix was the lighter gradient where the sky and mountains meet. I brought down the brightness as much as I could. Reducing it more lead to also reducing the brightness of the star trails within the glow.

Technical Details

Canon 5D MKIV
Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 @ 17mm F/11
Foreground – 3min, ISO400
Sky – 15x3min, ISO400

4 Likes
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Gorgeous!! The mud cracks are so interesting and wonderfully composed. The sky looks fine to me. The lighter tones near the horizon are the natural consequence of shooting through more (a thicker layer of) air there, with the pollution scattering more light, just as in the daytime. I think the gradient is a nice feature, as is how the trails are lower contrast toward the horizon.

It may be partly an optical illusion, but I have a feeling that it could use just a little CW rotation. Small nit, though, for a great image!

If you stack the files as layers in PS and put all in Lighten mode, there is no need to do a separate FG layer, unless you want to avoid the softening of the shadows from the moon’s movement. (The shadows would look like a single 45-min exposure, but at the same brightness of a 3 min exposure.) Stacking in Lighten mode gives good star trails with almost invisible gaps with the newer high-res sensors.

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Kyle, I agree with @Diane_Miller regarding the mud cracks. Their leading lines toward the mountains make for a strong composition. However, the foreground seems almost too bright. I like the lines, but I am also interested in the sky, which seems almost superfluous. I tried using a gradient to tone down the foreground, but it may not be at all what you want to say. Take it for what it is: a big spoonful of salt.

Star Trails
Star Trails683Ă—1024 182 KB

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Kyle, I like your emphasis on the mud cracks. Without the star trails, it would be nearly impossible to tell that this was a night shot. The drama in the cracks does a fine job of pulling my eyes into the distance. I do see some slight softness in the upturned crack tip just below the center. Any idea why?

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Terrific idea Kyle. This is a one-man lesson in the value – and often, the necessity – of prospecting and planning an image. I like the subtle star trails, not too bright, preserving the real feel – the stars in the night sky are quite often muted by atmospheric conditions, so the eye sees them as ghostly pinpricks of light. I would say that the lens, which delivered such a great foreground, has diminished those mountains so much that I thought at first they were mere sand dunes. Would be fun to remake this composition with a different lens, balanced in three slices as you do here, and see how strong the mountains could look.

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Hi Kyle,

Wonderful composition. The mudcrack selection draws you in immediately. In digital star trail photos, how do you deal with the small gaps between exposures?

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Initially I was going to say the lighter foreground was fine, but @Barbara_Djordjevic 's version reminded me that our eyes are attracted to areas of brightness. Looking at the original version, my eye lingers over the foreground mud cracks. With Barbara’s version, my eye immediately goes to the mountains, and then up to the stars.

I guess it depends on what @kyle wants our eyes to do?

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Kyle, what a great image and story! I think the foreground mud cracks are really the focal point of the image, with the background mountains and star trails as secondary elements, so I think you managed the relative brightness just fine. I agree with Diane that the image looks every so slightly rotated CCW. Also, maybe this is an artifact of downsizing the image, but the foreground looks slightly less than sharp. Was the foreground one frame or did you do focus stacking? I am also wondering what this monochrome image would look like with a hint of blue toning. Just a thought. Thanks for sharing this great image!

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@Diane_Miller, I cannot believe I missed the need for CW rotation! I guess that’s what happens when you stare at an image for too long concentrating on other aspects of the image.

@Barbara_Djordjevic & @Dan_Hicks & @Patrick_Campbell , thank you for posting an alternate version. I wanted viewer’s eyes drawn to the mud cracks, seeing the contrast created by the bright moon. Not many stars show up due to the lighting conditions, so I had a vision to emphasize the cracks. I do like the alternate version, but ultimately do like my original vision.

@Mark_Seaver & @Patrick_Campbell , the foreground is a focus stack. It looks sharp on my computer, so it may be an artifact of compression, or perhaps you managed to find the one soft spot I didn’t focus for!

@james7, I also would love larger mountains and is something that I debated with when originally creating my vision for the image. I decided on emphasizing the mud cracks, letting my wide angle lens get me very close to exaggerate their depth rather than having large mountains. I could try a longer focal length on my next visit!

@Youssef_Ismail, I have an action I run in Affinity (also works for Photoshop):

  1. Duplicate all layers except for the 1st & last.
  2. Set the top layer’s Blend Mode to Screen.
  3. Merge the top layer with the layer directly underneath.
  4. Change the merged layer’s Blend Mode to Lighten.
  5. Repeat with all layers.
  6. Merge all layers to flatten the image into one.

@Patrick_Campbell, blue toning would be great! Thank you for the idea. Do you have a recommended process for toning, or a hue value that works best? I always overdo it.

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@kyle, there are many ways to add blue (or other toning) to a monochrome image. Perhaps the easiest way is to open the image in PS, then add a black and white adjustment layer. Click the tint button and then use the slider to select which color tint you want. Then use the color picker circle to fine tune that selection.