🐾BillinGlendaleCA
I’ve been shooting nightscapes featuring the Milky Way for almost 7 years, shooting with 4 differenty cameras. First was with the Samsung NX500, then the NX1 which were smaller sensor cameras. Last year I moved to a full frame camera with the Sony A7iv which has better light gathering abilities as well as a wider field of view.
In July, I added the astro converted A7r to my toolkit. This was turning point in my astrophotography journey: first, when I took my first shots of the Milky Way, everything was red, so I had to set a custom white balance to get everything to look “normal”; second, I started to take more narrow field shots of nebula and galaxies(you’ve seen some of those here at On The Road). The later change in focus, lead to considering different processing software than I’d been using in the past(Sequator, Lightroom, and Photoshop) as well as differing techniques to process these photos. Most of the experienced deep space use a program called PixInsight at $250 is a bit out of my price range, so I went with Sirli a free open source app which had just been updated with many improvements and leaned how to use it thanks to the wonderful videos by Rich at Deep Space Astro on YouTube.
I’ve been mostly confined to home the past 5 months, first due to a tire on the Prius that I’ve not been able to get replaced, by work, by inclement weather that seems to coincide with my days off from work and the disaster with my star tracker that I mentioned on my last appearance on these pages.
This has given me time to think about some of the shots I’ve taken in the past and ways to make them better. I’ve had two problems with my more recent work(say the last 5 years), light pollution leading to discoloration of the Milky Way and lack of contrast, and color consistency between my shots. The Milky Way core in even my most recent shots has varied with too much yellow and too much red, the portion of the Milky Way above the core was usually hard to see, since increasing the brightness and contrast there affected the rest of the picture, even using a gradient.
I could go with what a fellow photographer on a FB page devoted to the Mojave desert produces, white stars and a dark blue background but I want to capture the violent and chaotic nature of the core of galaxy with stars of many colors drawn to the center of the galaxy by the super massive black hole and the swirling clouds of dust. Sirli helps in two aspects, I have more control over the light pollution by being able to do what is called Background Extraction that removes gradients in the shot and Color Calibration that neutralizes the background color and I can calibrate the same set of stars for each shot. I’m pretty happy with the results.
If you like these shots, consider subscribing to my Patreon at BillinGlendaleCA | creating Photos | Patreon.
I grew up in TO, I never remember seeing the Milky Way. When I was hiking down to Point Mugu State Park, I noticed these peaks and thought it would be a great foreground for a Milky Way shot, if only the light pollution wasn’t so bad. I decided to try anyway. When I arrived the Milky Way was barely visible, and only if you knew where to look. I snapped 40 shots with my NX1 and a foreground shot with the landscape being lit by the street lights behind me. I shared those shots with you last year. With these shots, after background extraction and color calibration, as I stretched the image to brighten it, it was like watching the image start to appear on the photo paper back in my darkroom as a teenager in TO.
On The Road – BillinGlendaleCA – The Milky Way Reimagined.Post + Comments (29)