The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I love reflections. I love the Milky Way. I love wild places where everything that exists is allowed to carry out its purpose. Last June, I found a place where all three things came together in near perfection. Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge is a truly wild place. Humans have left their mark here, but for the most part, nature is allowed to be, well, natural! The lakes are full of waterfowl and shorebirds, some of which are endangered but are coming back from the edge of extinction. The forest is alive with Moose, Grizzly Bears, and wildflowers. The sky is spectacular during the day with clouds dancing and flitting across Montana’s Big Sky in dramatic fashion on the whim of the wind. Aspen grove shimmer as the wind whispers through the forest. If you are fortunate at day’s end, the wind will cease and the stars will come out to glide across the vast expanse of the night sky. If the daytime sky is spectacular, the night time sky will quite simply take your breath away.
On this night, Lower Red Rock Lake was nearly calm, but occasional whispers of wind would mildly disturb the calm surface. The sky is so dark that I could clearly make out the Great Rift down the center of the Milky Way. If I squinted and didn’t look directly towards it, I could just barely see the Dark Horse Nebula too.
After a test shot revealed dramatic green bands of airglow, I began to notice that my eyes could see what to them appeared as a faint bluish light. I began to click off the many images that went into this stacked panorama as I listened to the chorus of bird sounds out on the water. The most distinct were the Trumpeter Swans that are one of the success stories that the Refuge is a part of. What a stunning night of photography I experienced out under Montana’s huge AND dark sky!
Specific Feedback
There are a lot of stitching errors in this image. They are all along the horizon line where reflection meets reality. I stack for noise reduction so I’m wondering how much of this is because too much time elapsed between each of the finished stacks. If I remember correctly, I tried to do 10 images but didn’t set the time between exposures for long enough and got just 5. The other thing it could very well be is the way the stars move in the opposite direction in the reflection. Could this contribute to the glitches? I am struggling to find ways to clone or heal the errors. I’ve not tried Photoshop, mostly because I dont really know how to use it!
Technical Details
Nikon D850
Sigma Art 20mm f/1.4
ISO 6400, f/2.8, 13 seconds
7 vertical image pano cropped to 1:3
Each image is stacked from 5 light and 15 darks
Processed in Lightroom, Ministars (photoshop action), and Starry Landscape Stacker
A stunning image, Paul. I don’t know of any way to fix the glitches you mentioned and I’m really surprised you could pull off a pano of stacked images since those bands of atmospheric glow were probably moving as well. Anyhow, I wouldn’t worry about slight anomalies along the boundary. They’re not visible at any sensible viewing distance.
Paul, the expansion of the airglow from the vanishing point really makes this a special view. In the largest view, I notice three stitching errors approaching the right hand edge. Other places, I see some things that might be alignment issues, but could also be part of the changing shoreline, so I would ignore those. The three places towards the right may be fixable with some careful cloning at various opacities. They look like camera alignment errors, suggesting that the camera moved slightly as you changed the angle.
Hi Paul,
wow, that airglow is awesome. I have never seen airglow at this intensity. When I saw the thumbnail to your post, I first thought it was Aurora. I love how the airglow seems to embrace the milky way arc.
Regarding the stiching issues: I don’t know how it can happen. But sometimes LR has its limitations when it comes to stiching panoramas. When LR fails to stich a panorama, I try to use PT Gui. It has endless options to optimize the stiching result, including setting control points on the individual images. But even PT Gui has it’s limits if the individual shots are not exact.
Was your tripod exactly level when you took the picture? I ask because the shoreline seems to be quite bent. This can also cause trouble with stitching.
You could fix those stiching issues in PS. I often try a simple process:
Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool and select a region that you want to fix:
Thank you SO much for this info Jens! I will spend some time on this. I am woefully ignorant when it comes to Photoshop. I will see if I can mimic your results! I see airglow frequently, especially in the summer when the Core is visible before midnight. I suspect that it has something to do with the causation of airglow making it more apparent when the molecules are more recently exposed to ultraviolet light. This is the only time I have ever been able to pick up the brighter bands with my un-aided eyes!
Wow, Paul! I too just love that airglow. The way it emanates up and out from the center under the Milky Way is just fantastic timing!
You did a lot of work to capture this, and sounds like plenty to do in processing. Photoshop takes practice and time. You’ll learn a technique and/or tool (like Jen’s which looks good, new to me!), and then move on and learn another tool. Little steps, learning to use tools. It’s a great program
Congrats onthis stunning shot in this beautiful location!
I came to Photoshop after 10 years with only Lightroom after learning some of the subtle and tricky things I could do with it like the one demonstrated above. My strategy with the steep learning curve was to only do things in it that I couldn’t do, or couldn’t do well, in Lr. That kept things to a minimum to start. Then I took an online course that gave me the basics of masking, layers, layer masks and all that stuff. Instead of going deep with the interface directly, I decided to get the TK8 Actions Panel that works as plug in and makes many complex things easier. It has its own learning curve, but there are great video guides and tutorials that you can purchase with the panel that make things a lot easier. Now I pop almost everything there because of the subtle things I can do that are simple for me now. And I’m still learning so it’s all good.
Hi Paul! That airglow is wild. Makes the Milky Way almost look like a bouquet. Given that I’m looking at it on my phone I couldn’t really see the technical issues, but as an overall composition I think it knocks it our if the park.
