Relentless Meanderings

[Paul_Holdorf]

Critique Style Requested: Standard

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

Description

Relentless Meanderings

The top portion of a tree is often referred to as the crown. It is a fitting descriptor for such a majestic member of the forest. As I stood in the presence of these stately Fir Trees in the wee hours of the morning, I could not help but wonder at the immensity of the scene before me. In hushed reverence, this wild place was nearly silent. No cars racing to get nowhere fast. No frantic rumble of airplanes. In fact, I heard no sound, short of my own footsteps that could be attributed to humans. All I heard was the relentless meandering of the nearby creek. Even though the moon had set some time ago, the snow on the ground reflected starlight and made everything seem to glow in the dark. I even saw a few meteors streak across the sky, but none chose to enter the composition that I had come here to capture. Nothing is more satisfying to a photographer than discovering that the image you had visualized a few days prior would indeed make a compelling photograph! All I had to do was be there and push the shutter release a few times. The crown of stars alongside the crown of the forest was precisely as I had seen in my mind’s eye, and I walked away as grateful as I could possibly be.

Specific Feedback

I photographed this location a week prior to this. The Milky Way was quite low on the horizon and mostly blocked by the mountains and the trees. I thought though, that after the time change, the extra hour of darkness in the morning might allow the core to get high enough before astronomical twilight took over. Turn out thats exactly what happened and I was thrilled to get a full arch pano! I do love the area of the core around the Dark Horse Nebula. Do you think the colors are overdone there? I included an uncropped version of the image for reference. Processing revealed a bit of green airglow on the lower right. The brightness on the lower left is light pollution from Bozeman, about 10 miles away.

Technical Details

Nikon D850
Sigma Art 20mm 1.4,
ISO 6400, f/2, 10 seconds

6 image panorama with each of the 6 being a stack of 10 light and 50 dark images stacked in Starry Landscape Stacker. Processed in PtGUI for pano stitching, Topaz Sharpen, Ministars, and Lightroom Classic CC

I had two lumicube 2.0 lights on level 2 with diffusers to try to make the dark trees a little less noisy.

I don’t know if it’s proper workflow or not, but I go back and forth between these programs quite a bit. I usually sharpen first, then process it a bit, then over to the Ministars action in Photoshop and then back to Lightroom. Once in Lightroom again, I typically find a few other tweets then save the final version.

[Diane_Miller]

Wonderful!!! You have a lovely but simple FG as the main element with a low MW the cherry on the cupcake. It is gorgeous how it follows the arc of the trees! I think the lighting and processing is spot-on. Next month it will be higher and this location should be another great opportunity.

I love those dust lanes reaching out from the galactic center toward the Rho Ophiuchus and Antares!!

I still haven’t had a chance to use PTGui, but I wonder if there are different “projections” (whatever it may call them) that give a less-distorted final image. It helps if the camera is aimed level and the point of rotation over the pano head is at the entrance pupil of the lens. Then just crop the unwanted area at the bottom of the frame. Camera oriented vertically to include the most of the sky. But maybe you did that. With the MW this low and a 20mm lens, I would expect you would have more sky if the lens is aimed level.

The time change didn’t have any effect on how high it was at astronomical twilight. The intervening week would have helped a little but the “sky’s” rotation by next month will make that better. It just meant it could be an hour later when your alarm went off. (Not insignificant!)