A Milky Way Whisper

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
This is from last November, I ran up to shoot fall colors in Yosemite. This is from Gates of the Valley. The water was quite low, and with that big old tree out of the way of the main viewing area, it is really easy to get out into the middle of the Merced.

As I was shooting, I had to deal with lot's of cars driving by. I don't think I could get at most 2 shots in a row without any kind of car lights. I just had my remote release locked in though, because sometimes you just don't know and the car lights can light up the foreground in a cool way. In most of the car headlight shots, the lights were coming right into the camera and way too bright, but there was 2 or 3 that the lighting was pretty cool.

This isn't the best time of year to be shooting the Milky Way, but even it's whisper is cool to see and catch I think. :)

I used Kyles Night time Noise reduction method to deal with the noise.
https://www.focalworld.com/index.php?articles/night-time-noise-reduction.45/

So this is a stack of 4 images all shot within a 3 or 4 minute span. The main coloring is from 1 shot that turned out the wildest. The other images weren't as colorful, but they were lit up enough to help when I used the Mean blending mode on the stack of 4 so that the main colors on the ground didn't disappear.

This one has grown on me. Perhaps the foreground might be too wild for some of you, but I kind of like it. :)

All comments are welcome,

Jim

_D855764_dw.jpg
 

AlanLichty

Moderator
Looks like the stars are erupting from the end of the valley. The foreground illumination is more uniform than most variants of light painting I have seen.
 

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
Thanks Alan. For such a wide open area there, it was a pleasant surprise to get the whole area lit up like that. I think I am going to try it again this fall as I also like the position of the Milky Way there.
 

Ben Egbert

Forum Helper
Staff member
This is a different MW shot as the MW is only a partial, must have been fairly long focal length. I like the way the foreground is lit and you don't really need the whole MW. Having it aligned with the gap in the horizon is neat.

I would like to see a tutorial on "mean blending" something I have not ventured into yet.
 

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
This is a different MW shot as the MW is only a partial, must have been fairly long focal length. I like the way the foreground is lit and you don't really need the whole MW. Having it aligned with the gap in the horizon is neat.

I would like to see a tutorial on "mean blending" something I have not ventured into yet.
Thanks so much Ben! I am glad you liked it.

This is with my Sigma 14mm f1.8. The Milky Way fades out a bit (it’s still there) because of the time of the year, so this is the tail of the MW which ends up being very light.
 

Kyle Jones

Moderator
Nice execution Jim - that's a good way to take advantage of the MW tail and the random road lighting. Two things I'd play around with if this was mine: (1) Try some of the vertical distortion from point the lens up - the trees and mountains are all pointing into the valley. I wouldn't try to completely straighten it, but a little might help and I think you have the room to handle the resulting crop; (2) Have you played with color balancing the ground layer? I could see taking it a little more blue/green and adding a little more contrast.
 

Mike Lewis

Staff Member
As stated above, the foreground lighting looks much more natural and pleasing than I was expecting from your write-up. I think Kyle might be on to something with the color temp though, but it is really not objectionable in any case. And I like the amount of Milky Way here - every shot that includes it does not have to be some super wide angle arch of stars. This is more of a natural eye FOV framing to me.

Very nice result - I see why it has been growing on you!

ML
 

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
Nice execution Jim - that's a good way to take advantage of the MW tail and the random road lighting. Two things I'd play around with if this was mine: (1) Try some of the vertical distortion from point the lens up - the trees and mountains are all pointing into the valley. I wouldn't try to completely straighten it, but a little might help and I think you have the room to handle the resulting crop; (2) Have you played with color balancing the ground layer? I could see taking it a little more blue/green and adding a little more contrast.
Thanks Kyle! I am glad you like it.

I already did some WA distortion correction. I didn’t want to lose the lit up tree on the right, so I stopped where I did. I probably can do some more localized straightening with the warp tool, I will look into that.

I can play with the WB on the foreground too. I do like how the bushes and trees turned orange, red and yellow. I don’t want to lose that, but I will definitely try cooling it down a bit more and see what it looks like.
 
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