Yosemite Chapel

[JimFox]

After Oliver and his group was done with Horsetail Falls on Fire, we ran up to Tunnel View to photograph the stars. After that we ran down to the Chapel. The snow was beat up, but it still looked cool I think. The snowmen are a nice touch.

This was captured with the new Sigma 14mm f1.4 lens. Yes.... f1.4! They upgraded the champion of night skies, their 14mm f1.8 and increased it with a stop of extra light to f1.4. The only issue is, it's only available for Sony and Leica mounts. Nikon and Canon both haven't given permission for their mounts to be used. Not sure why, but one of the great things about Nikon when they created the Z mount for the mirrorless, it's now wide enough to use lens adapters.

So as I have been contemplating upgrading my old camera's to the Nikon Z8, that Sigma 14mm f1.4 is probably the lens that pushed me over the edge. You guys know that probably 50% of my photography is at night, so to be able to get a 14mm f1.4 that is very sharp even at f1.4, I just couldn't resist it once I found a lens adapter that worked for it.

In this image now, since the almost full moon was out, there was no need for f1.4 (though I tested it a bit). But I shot it at f8 because I wanted the star spikes to come out of the moon.

Nikon Z8
Sigma 14mm f1.4

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice star spikes on the lights in front of the chapel too. This worked out quite well.

Are those snowmen off to the right of the chapel?

 

[JimFox]

Nice star spikes on the lights in front of the chapel too. This worked out quite well.

Are those snowmen off to the right of the chapel?

Thanks Alan. The star spikes on the chapel made me chuckle as what came to my mind was that the chapel had eyelashes....

Yes, there were snowman actually encircling the chapel. It was like we interrupted some animated feature of snowmen attacking the chapel. I thought maybe this was a scene out of the movie Frozen.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

If not for the chapel lights, this could pass as a daytime image.

 

[JimFox]

If not for the chapel lights, this could pass as a daytime image.

Yep, and I tried to make it darker, but then especially the ground, the snow turned to looking gray. So when I processed this I lowered the exposure as low as I could go until the snow looked bad.

That's what our mini-sun does at night.