Through the Archway

Image Critiques Nightscape & Astro Critiques
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Through the Archway
Through the Archway1550×550 373 KB

This is not my first foray into astrophotography or night photography as I have dabbled in the past with star trails on film. About 14 years ago I managed to photograph an interesting star trail photograph over a three-hour period on 4x5 film looking up through the trees in Yosemite while my campfire lit the bottoms and sides of the pines in the campground. Since that time I have wondered how I could photograph the Milkyway on 4x5 film. No, this is not on 4x5, but I am on my way to that happening.

Dan Kearl’s work has really inspired me to capture the night sky and so I present this photo of the Milkyway Arch as my first attempt. From 2010 to 2015 I was working on building a barndoor tracker that had enough power to move a 4x5 camera. I got very close to having a successful device. It was big, bulky, and power-hungry. It was not perfect in tracking and needed a way more than necessary complicated algorithm on a microcontroller to drive a stepper motor turning a power screw. Then I discovered compact and portable star trackers that were actually both capable of moving my camera and affordable. I now own one. I have a photograph in mind that I have not seen anyone do, and furthermore definitely not on 4x5 film. Last month I made my first attempt at creating that photo, but I will leave it at that until it is finished and I post it here for your feedback. I ran into a problem in that attempt in that light pollution, which I failed to realize would be in my frame until I was out there, causing my film to be overexposed. the foreground is done, but the milky way needed to be retaken without any light pollution. I searched a settled on photographing the Milkyway portion of my pre-visualized photograph from Big Sur. I did that just last Friday night. While I was there just waiting for the film exposure to finish, I decided to play around with my newly acquired Nikon D850 and a rented 14-24mm lens, as well as testing out all my other lenses on different portions of the night sky.

I don’t think it is all that unique as I have seen many such images, but for some reason, they all seemed too cartoonish for my liking and always had an over-lit landscape to go with it. So after that lengthy introduction, here is my “first” astrophotography image.

Specific Feedback Requested

My questions:

How did I do?

Does it look real?

Is it something that you would expect to see or have I over-processed it?

Are the colors realistic or even believable?

The strange green glow center bottom is light pollution from San Luis Obispo and the small dome of light on the hill horizon I believe is from King City. How can that green glow be toned down without altering the colors elsewhere in the image?

Technical Details

Photographed with a Nikon D850, Sigma 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 14mm, Manual focus, at ISO 3200, f2.8, for 10 seconds, on 7 separate frames and assembled into a panoramic on PS CS6. Further, since I am still using PS CS6, ACR in that version cannot read the RAW files from the D850, so all 7 frames were captured as TIFF files. I did not have the post-processing latitude afforded by RAW files, so I processed the images as I would scanned films.

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Hi Youssef,
Thanks for posting your first astro image here. I have been a long proponent of more natural nightscapes and have been making panoramas like this since 2011. I think you might get addicted if you’re not careful. :slight_smile:
It will be interesting to see how you are able to use a tracker on 4x5 film - can’t wait to see that.
I think w/ digital it’s really important to have a RAW file so it was sad to read you couldn’t process it with your version of ACR. It really gives you a ton of latitude to work with.

I thought it was funny/accurate that a lot of modern night photography looks cartoonish although hey if that’s your thing, whatever. The trend these days is to do a blue hour or daytime blend of the foreground and the night sky (often not even from the same tripod or geographic location)… but I digress!

I think for a night photograph of the night sky to have interest in this fashion, you still need a compelling or interesting foreground. In this case, there isn’t one at all - so I would really encourage you to seek that out. It’s amazing what you can do even with a single RAW file on a dark night. I have many examples on my website… a quarter moon also helps.

The light pollution doesn’t bother me at all and it is just the reality of photographing the night sky near cities these days. I actually don’t know that I agree that it is light pollution and rather might be airglow.

One thing I noticed here is that your horizon has sharpness halos so it might have been over sharpened a bit.

I think it looks realistic color wise - I always aim for a dark/black sky and a slightly bluer/oranger milky way core than this but its all personal preference IMO, since the eye can’t see this light the same way a camera can anyways.

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I’m definitely no astro photography expert by any means. But I think this looks realistic. It is a nice look at a significant portion of the Milky Way. The foreground seems to mimic the shape of the stars too. Nice work.

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Hi Yussef. Congrats on your first astrophotography image. You managed to capture a lot of detail in the sky. I’m excited to see how your Milkway images turn out on 4x5 film.

I’ve taken a few shots with a star tracker and I know it can be very technical, getting all your alignments and such, but throwing in the 4x5 film setup sounds like a whole different challenge. I tend to not worry too much about the reality of my astro images. None of the astro images that I like from other photographers are realistic.

The camera sees a lot more than our eyes can. I think it’s just a matter of personal taste. Some people like a lot of stars in there images and some like only a few. Some like magenta colours, others blues, and then others like none.

I noticed that you have a lot of stars in your shot. There is a way to reduce the number of stars when you process them but I haven’t done this for a while, so I’m not sure which app does it. Since you have a panorama image in PS, it’s going to be a high res image. You could try converting it to a smart object and then editing in ACR. It won’t be the same as if it were RAW but you should still have some leeway to push the pixels around. Great first astro image. I’m looking forward to your next ones.

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I know virtually nothing about astrophotography but I was wondering if the greenish yellow lights can be selected through photoshop and modified to match the color of the rest of the sky. That’s assuming you would prefer an unlit sky.