Valley of the Gods Milky Way

[JimFox]

As I continue to work through my backlog, I am up to April. I am also working my way to Colorado and stopped at my Son's house near Santa Fe New Mexico for a couple of nights. I have my 2 telescopes up and running in his yard, and I am inside working on photos.

This is from Valley of the Gods located near Monument Valley and is now a part of the Bears Ears National Monument. This is Rooster Butte.

This was captured with my old Nikon D810, which was actually a used D810 I bought to replace my own D810 that got blown over in some sudden gusts a couple of years ago in Valley of Fire. The camera had some occasional sensor heat or some light leak, though I think it was the sensor. When it poked it's head up the whole bottom of the image would turn a horribly bright Magenta color that was also super noisy. And so that was the case with this image, which is just one of about 1200 I took for a time lapse. I minimized it the best I could, and it was minimized enough that it wouldn't have been noticed had I not said anything. But I also took one of the twilight images and then blended it in about 30% opacity on the bottom to add more detail and help cover that sensor issue.

Nikon D810
Samyang 14mm MkII f2.8
ISO3200
f2.8
25 secs

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[AlanLichty]

The end result worked quite well. I would not have had a clue you were having light leak issues if it weren't for your description.

 

[JimFox]

The end result worked quite well. I would not have had a clue you were having light leak issues if it weren't for your description.

Thanks Alan, it was a bit tricky to get them corrected, but I am happy with the end result. I am glad you didn't notice them either.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

The diagonal of the MW works as a nice composition element. Nice work with the processing. No hint of any light leak.

 

[Michael13]

A beautiful clear sky you had and Valley of the Gods is a great place to have one! I don't see any light leaks either, foreground looks clean. This would also work great as a square image.

 

[Beth]

nicely done

 

[Alan Milnes]

Beautiful Jim. Hope you are not offended by a suggestion to mask the foreground and open the exposure a little.

 

[JimFox]

The diagonal of the MW works as a nice composition element. Nice work with the processing. No hint of any light leak.

Thanks Jameel!

 

[JimFox]

A beautiful clear sky you had and Valley of the Gods is a great place to have one! I don't see any light leaks either, foreground looks clean. This would also work great as a square image.

Thanks Michael, I will have to give that a try.

 

[JimFox]

nicely done

Thank you so kindly!

 

[JimFox]

Beautiful Jim. Hope you are not offended by a suggestion to mask the foreground and open the exposure a little.

Hey Alan, thanks so much!

Suggestions are always great, and a great way to discuss an image.

I can see why you would like to see the ground a bit brighter. It was really dark on this night with no moon up. So I wanted to keep to the spirit of how it looked. But I also believe in our choice as artists to make an image fit our vision. Now that it's been a few days, I will go back and see about brightening up the ground just a bit more and see if it still feels balanced to me. Thanks!