Last night I carried out an astro shoot I’ve had in my planner for over a year. The last cloudless and moonless night I’ll be seeing in the north island for some time.
For those who don’t yet know, I’ll be moving to the deep south next week to start a new career in Astrotourism.
So last night I made the short sharp hike to Tairua’s Mount Paku summit to capture the Milkyway setting across the western horizon!
Now let’s talk photography politics for a minute.
In the past, I’ve been posed with questions like:
“Is this image Photoshopped?”
“How do you know that’s where the milkyway will be in the sky?”
“Can you see that with the naked eye?”
The term “Photoshopped” in the past has had it’s meaning tainted in a way that implies an image has been superimposed, resulting in a composite or “fake” photo. The truth is YES, I use Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom software to develop my images.
However my images are NEVER superimposed.
Every single one of my photos represent a time and place.
I study astronomy and use clever smartphone apps or websites that integrate Google maps with an ephemeris timeline. This way I can plan my images well in advance, based on geographic location and time or position of the earth in relation to the sky.
Once I’ve collected the image data from that scene, Photoshop is then used to combine multiple exposures into the likes of this panorama.
The image is then tone mapped, taking advantage of all the captured data to create the final balanced image that I had first envisaged.
The reality is that the detail I capture with my camera, cannot always be seen by the naked eye. Lenses with bright apertures, fitted to powerful camera bodies capable of high ISO sensitivity and long exposure times, result in an image produced of accumulated light.
The human eye is simply not sensitive enough to register the same amount of light all at once.
This is just one of the many reasons I find Astrophotography so thrilling, is that I can showcase scenes that are very real, but simply cannot be observed with the naked human eye.
This image is a stitched Panorama compiled of two rows of 9 frames, and was captured last night just before midnight.
♥️ #Sony A7s
♣️ Sony 28mm f/2.0 lens
♦️ #Sirui W-2004 tripod
♠️18x 15sec f3.2 ISO8000
You might also like
