Pleiades in the Park

Image Critiques Nightscape & Astro Critiques
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My name is Julie Botts, I have been an active amateur photographer for 10 years. I am involved with night photography and macro/studio photography primarily as well as nature.

Flattened 50mm Final Foreground 3 Frames copy
Flattened 50mm Final Foreground 3 Frames copy2740Ă—2102 2.54 MB

This image is a composite/blend, the sky is 20 stacked images taken at 120 seconds at 50mm focal length on a Canon Eos 90D, the foreground was also taken at 50mm but the exposure time was 4 minutes. The images were taken in Joshua Tree National Park at the end of September 2022.

1 Like
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Very well done… Stars are sharp, Pleiades is easy to blow out and you kept the highlights…
I might take some green out of the FG for my taste. The tree blending into the sky is excellent. very little haloing…

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Welcome, Julie!! You’ll find a few night photographers here. This is very nice and I agree with @Dan_Kearl on the FG color. I wonder about a slightly different composition aimed more to the right to include more of that tree on the right, and to move the Pleiades off center. The lens has good detail in the corners – not many are good for stars. It’s always nice to have more shooting and processing details.

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Thank you for the feedback, the color balance was tricky, we had more rain in the days before this session and the plants were a bit more green than usual.

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Thank you for the feedback, there really isn’t much more to the right of the frame as one of my shooting buddies was set up in that area. I did try to get enough foreground to make it easy to set the composition. I left what was there as a bit of a frame as opposed to cutting it out altogether. You must know how it is when you think you have everything you need before tearing down and heading home. I just moved from that area of the country so there isn’t much chance of any corrective sessions. Pleiades is in the correct position for the time I started the foreground, I do want to do a bit more clone stamping around the Joshua Trees to remove that bit of halo.