The photographer has shared comprehensive information about their intent and creative vision for this image. Please examine the details and offer feedback on how they can most effectively realize their vision.
Self Critique
Individually, both the sky and foreground seem ok - but the blend ?
Creative direction
The goal is to create a realistic MW through the blue hour foreground
Specific Feedback
Any aesthetic, conceptual feedback is appreciated
Comments on the technical side to include exposure, color and post processing in particular
Difficult to assess print quality from this jpeg - unless someone has ideas as to how to judge this aspect
Technical Details
Sky - 5 secs / f 2.8 at ISO 12,800 - 20 images run through SLS
Foreground - 30 seconds, F11, ISO 100 - I believe stacked
Description
Did a Time Lapse but also wanted to get a decent still image
Really nice! At first glance the distant snowy mountains appear a bit tilted, but that could be an illusion related to their height and angle. I wonder how it might look it you dehazed them a little bit? They sort of have the look shadowed areas get if you lighten the shadows too much. I’ll tell you what though, I love this shot! I need to learn how to blend a blue hour foreground. Mine are always awful noisy!
Hi Karl,
that’s a beautiful Nightscape image. That area looks really cool. Much potential for interesting foreground objects.
I see one issue that comes from your blend: the mountains in the distance seem quite blue.
Your blend could benefit from eliminating the blue color from that mountains. Maybe I would burn the peaks as well because they are very bright.
What do you mean by that? Do you try to print the exact same jpeg that you uploaded here?
When I want to print my images, I prepare them in separate files. Most of the time I brighten them, resize them to the appropriate paper size, and add some print sharpening. Sometimes those print files look really awful when I view them on my monitor but they look good on paper.
Preparing images for print is a totally different topic. There are already some discussions about that here on NPN:
Lovely!! The composition is very pleasing and I think you generally achieved a good balance of FG and sky. I find the blue-cyan sky color interesting and the detail on the MW is very nicely understated and lovely. And it’s an interesting idea to have the bit of light painting at the end of the rainbow. The mountains on the far right do feel a bit too bright – maybe a combination of darkening them a bit and lightening the vignetting in the sky on that side.
I wonder about a comparison of the stack of 20 vs. the new noise reduction in LR on a single image. Would you be interested in having a look at that and reporting back on it? I haven’t tried using SLS for NR, and hope I can remember to give it a try on an upcoming dark sky trip.
The snow capped mountains do appear to need some adjustment - i tried a little less blue - seems better
Re my comment on Printing - i meant it would be difficult to predict how this digital image would do in print. I am aware of some of the adjustments needed prior to printing but thank you nevertheless @Jens_Ober @Diane_Miller - I will put up 2 images of the same shot - 12,800 iso using LR DeNoise as well as 20 stacked
This composition works well. I like the way the Milky Way flows up from the arch; it creates a nice focal point.
I do agree that the distant peaks are a bit bright. There’s a lot of personal taste with these images, but they do look more natural to me if the distant objects are darker relative to the close ones (as opposed to even lighting throughout. Here’s a quick and dirty example of what I mean:
I think @John_Williams has a good idea here. I neglected to mention above that there is a lot of purple in the stars. There are probably several lens aberrations here – fast wide angle lenses have a lot of issues with stars. I don’t know of any way to correct the issues with star shapes except to stop down (helps in some cases) and to shoot a pano stitch so the clearer center portions can be used.
The Defringe correction (back in the raw file, in Lens Corrections in LR) will at least remove the color.
