Earlier this week, the family and I spent a few days in the Mojave Desert, at Red Rock Canyon State Park. The first night was cloudy, rainy, and very windy. A couple nights later, it was calm, clear, and very dark. Here’s the view west from our campsite.
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Awesome!
Such a beautiful night sky!
Wow Tim, this is an amazing photo!!! I love it!! I took a star trail shot once with my tent near the Eureka Dunes in Death Valley I was pretty happy with, but nothing compared to this! This is spectacular and I like the colors/processing a lot too!
Thanks for the details. I’m going to have to practice more with night sky photos. So far I haven’t been impressed with what I’ve been getting. I get a lot of noise in mine, perhaps the difference between cameras? Other than that, I give you rather than the equipment credit for getting good results.
Hi, Larry! The exposure for the top photo (with tent) was 26 seconds at f/4.5 at ISO 3200. The other photo was 30 seconds at f/4.5 at ISO 1600. Both were made with a 24-120 mm lens set to 24 mm, using the full frame “FX” sensor on a Nikon D700. Both were processed initially in Lightroom, then a bit further in Photoshop. Curves were pushed quite a bit to lighten the sky, increase contrast between the sky and stars, and adjust the colors a little. This was a first experiment at night sky photography, so the initial exposures were probably not perfect, but close enough to make the pictures work.
Tim
Nice. I don’t usually ask technical questions but I’m wondering what kind of exposure settings you used for these images.