Last weekend I joined a group of friends for a camping trip on the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, NV. I actually grew up there and hadn't been back in about 4 years, so when Katie and Scott asked me to do some formal wedding portraits of them, I immediately said "we should go to the playa!" BTW, I've never shot a wedding in my life!
It was a great time! A few of us stayed up all night BSing and watching the amazing sky (you can see the band of the milky way perfectly as the nearest city is about 100 mi away)! We were up early for the sunrise and I got some pretty good stuff, although I still need to edit a bunch. The one caveat of the trip was that I lost a 2GB memory card with some pretty damn good photos on there. Luckily, none of them were wedding portraits.
Below: Nikon D300, Cheap Tokina 28-70mm 2.8 lens, Quantum Q-flash to camera left through Westcott Halo.
As always, comments welcome and look for more photos from this shoot soon.
A couple from last week.
Here are some watches I recently shot for a client who sells on ebay. He specifically asked for photos that were realistic looking but professional *whatever that means*. I used my two studio heads with large softboxes and combined with my sb800 to shoot most of these.
The Navitimer is worth something like $4000. The other two watches were worth around a grand each.
This was only visible sign of life that we found during our expedition inside the multiple mile long wooden flume near Reno, NV. Fielding, Nick, Tony and I spend hours exploring and photographing this amazing find!
The flume turned out to be a fairly dangerous place as one of the photographers in our group almost fell through the rotten, wooden floor. We could see light coming through the floor in places. The flume runs about 15-20 feet above the ground, so falling through would not have been too fun.
Here are a couple of long exposure shots with the new cam. Noise performance is really great compared to my old D200. The last two photos were taken WITHOUT long exposure noise reduction.
Verdi bridge (look closely for the train), 12 mins, f/8 @ ISO 200 with the fisheye, daylight WB.
Robb Drive Overpass: 6mins, f/8 @ ISO200, noise reduction off, 12-24mm
I finally got my new camera on Monday and I've been really itching to shoot something, so I decided to play around with some flowers.
Comments welcome...
Another old one...
Since I haven't had a camera for a while, I figured I'd start to post some older photos I never got around to editing.
Be sure to click through to the full version as Vox overshaprens the image when it resizes it.
Here is one from July:
Here are a couple photos from a small get-together with some new friends. Taken about 20-25 minutes North of Reno, the photo below illustrates the light pollution that city-dwelling astronomy enthusiasts must deal with. The 10" Meade scope still provided some beautiful views. Notice the constellation Orion just over Richard's shoulder and his Edmond's Scientific scope in the background. We had a great time looking at Mars, Saturn, Andromeda, The Great Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, double cluster (NGC869 and 844) and the Moon.
There are two major hurdles doing lunar and planetary photography with a D-SLR through a scope: Focusing and combating atmospheric seeing conditions. Compared to a nice, bright eyepiece, looking through a DSLR provides a much dimmer, wider field of view that makes it very difficult to perform fine focusing. There are solutions, either using a computer to control exposures and analyze focus as you take multiple photos adjusting the focus each time or by utilizing a live-view if your camera supports it.
Even if "perfect" focus is achieved, a photo may still appear to be blurry due to atmospheric conditions (heat rising, ect). Looking through a scope during "poor to moderate seeing" is like looking through heat-waves (see this 45 second clip of Jupiter for example). The best lunar and planetary images are done by using webcams that are capable of super-fast frame rates of 100+ frames per second. Software goes through hundreds of photos to find the sharp ones.
Even under decent seeing, I'm still having great difficulty focusing without the aide of a computer, a webcam or live-view. I did get a couple sharp ones and they look amazing when viewed at their full 10MP resolution (something you cannot get with a webcam). This is not cropped and gives you an idea of the field of view I get with the setup.
Finally, here is a candid group shot with me at the scope.
Unfortunately, sometime within the last few months, I was diagnosed with a very expensive illness that makes for cold, sleepless nights and long periods of time staring at the sky. That's right, the astronomy bug.
Being a very wide field with so much to learn and so many different things to try, getting into astronomy reminds me very much of the overwhelming, yet exciting feeling I had when venturing into photography.
So, for the last few clear nights, I've been stargazing through the glory of a big 10" scope (a Meade LX200R). It is a truly amazing piece of hardware: GPS, super smooth slewing and tracking and Ritchey-Chretien optics (same as the Hubble).
Last night was the first night ever (after only 3 nights of viewing), that I decided to try some down and dirty astro-photography. I say "down and dirty" because true astro-photographers use a complex method of photography involving two cameras, one for guiding the scope through a finder scope, and one for doing the imaging itself. The advanced guys also take advantage of a CCD's linear exposure recording and "stack" multiple images of the same scene for the benefit of better dynamic range and noise performance.
Top left: M42: The Great Orion Nebula
Bottom left: Saturn in the Distance
Comments welcome...
Recent Comments
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queerbubbles said:
Beautiful beautiful beautiful! Did I mention beautiful? Its like an ad out of a bridal magazine. read more
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C. Shadows said:
Sorry, I'm new here and didn't realize the description was there. :( I appreciate the advice however, thank you! :)... read more
on Alone
on Camping trip/portraits on the blackrock desert