You guys make go out and try tonight 😄 It might be a spectacular night ...
You guys make go out and try tonight 😄 It might be a spectacular night ...
Second one is my pick
Yes, I think Panasonic's capture is better since I exposed for the highlight and recovered all underexposed details. They are all converted from RAW files but it seems to me Q2 has less room for highlight reduction.
Thank you Daneland. I'm glad you like them.
Very nice light and compositions Vahur. I like them all.
This was tuff, there is no way you would shoot this shot with an electronic device, the spider was swiging by 2 strands and only the constant turn of the dial and continuous shooting made it a reasonable sucess, its not perfect shooting 400 images stacks with a spider swinging in the air, i could rock my whole studio by moving my chair. i have no vibrations but can rock it ever so slightly as my studio is 2 floors up and sitting on 6 350mm dia telegraph poles 😁
Personally I like these shots much more than most of your other spider shots because in these two very much more of the spider is not blurred.
I understand why other similar shots have much more of the spider blurred.
continuous shooting made it a reasonable sucess
I think Topaz's Sharpen AI would improve it even more.
@SteveMonks has written:Obligatory Aurora Pics
This week's post was going to be all about yesterday's trip to The Lake District which yielded some nice images, despite being a bright sunny day, but last night's events changed that plan.
I've captured faint aurora pictures here in Lancashire, before, but last night was astounding. Not only did the camera pick it up rather well, but you could clearly see the shape and colours with the naked eye. Even weirder, rather than a faint band along the northern horizon, most of the action here was directly overhead, even pointing the camera South captured some interesting details.
According to aurora watch the solar storm is still blazing away as I type this, so we may even get another show tonight.
These images were taken between 23:00 and 01:30 last night / this morning. I ended up going through them until 03:00 this morning, followed by about four hours sleep, so I feel like death today, but it was well worth it. Regular viewers may recognise some of these locations. This is just a small selection of the images from last night as I'm sure the thread will be awash with this sort of thing before the day is out, but let me know if you want to see any more as I have loads of them.
All images taken entirely in manual mode with the Nikon Z8 and 14-30 f/4.0S lens (manual focus, 13sec exposure at f/8 as ISO 1600). Processed from single raw files in Capture One Pro 23. I did try running a few through Topaz to clean up the noise, but it just introduced additional artefacts, so I discarded those. As the aurora action was mostly directly above us, most of my images ended up in portrait orientation to try and fit as much of the higher angled sky in the shot as possible.
You guys make go out and try tonight 😄 It might be a spectacular night ...
heading out tonight 😎
Personally I like these shots much more than most of your other spider shots because in these two very much more of the spider is not blurred.
I understand why other similar shots have much more of the spider blurred.
@DonaldB has written:continuous shooting made it a reasonable sucess
I think Topaz's Sharpen AI would improve it even more.
the only thing thats going to improve detail is a $10,000 objective 😁 my $100 ones are doing fine. i did buy a $200 used nikon that was suppose to be good, but put it in the bin. 😒
the only thing thats going to improve detail is a $10,000 objective 😁
I suppose it depends on the type of improvement someone is after.
Evening in Prizren
My Balkan tour continues with a night stopover in Prizren, cultural heart of Kosovo. Looks like they could use a good electrician.
This is nice.
I know what you mean about those bloody cables, they spoiled many a shot for me in Thailand.
@Wormsmeat has written: @SteveMonks has written: @Wormsmeat has written: @SteveMonks has written:Obligatory Aurora Pics
This week's post was going to be all about yesterday's trip to The Lake District which yielded some nice images, despite being a bright sunny day, but last night's events changed that plan.
I've captured faint aurora pictures here in Lancashire, before, but last night was astounding. Not only did the camera pick it up rather well, but you could clearly see the shape and colours with the naked eye. Even weirder, rather than a faint band along the northern horizon, most of the action here was directly overhead, even pointing the camera South captured some interesting details.
Amazing. Nobody will believe they're real! The tree looks like a Harry Potter wand. My daughter rang me at 11pm to tell me to look, I was asleep. Couldn't see much from where I was and was so tired after a 3 day fishing trip that I gave up. Wish I had stayed with it now. I also wish it would have happened while I was sitting watching the night sky whilst fishing.
My daughter took this from her balcony in Bromley.It's impressive to see how well it could be picked up in areas with light pollution, like your daughters picture, I'm quite surprised by that. Could she actually see it at the time?
I very nearly didn't go out myself, having just got back from an exhausting (but enjoyable) day in The Lakes, but I saw the reading on Aurorawatch which was dramatically higher than I've ever seen it and figured it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity to see this elusive phenomena this far South, so I dragged myself out of the house and I'm glad I did, not just for the photos, but to have seen it with my own eyes, it was an amazing thing to see.
It was difficult to photograph, with the main effects being very high in the sky, so including some foreground element to contrast against it was a bit of a challenge. Surprisingly, we had White Coppice and the moors pretty much all to ourselves, it seems most other local photographers headed for more significant and recognisable landmarks such as Rivington Pike and Anglezarke.
Obligatory selfie
Just to prove I was actually there, although there is a bit of fakery with this one, I was wearing this ridiculous looking bright orange top, which stood out a bit too much here, so I've colour replaced it with something more conservative. The rest is real though (albeit tweaked in the usual way).
Ha! Couldn't have you overshadowing the lights. And yes, she saw it with the naked eye.
I was trying to avoid comments such as "annoying distractions at the edge of the frame leading the eye away from the main subject" ;-p
Anyway, here's a before and after, showing the amount of tweaking in that image, but also with the colour replacement layer turned off...
The untweaked side is quite representative of how it looked live.
I think I'd have changed your shirt into a subtle blend of shimmering pink, purple and teal, you'd have virtually disappeared.
This was tuff, there is no way you would shoot this shot with an electronic device, the spider was swiging by 2 strands and only the constant turn of the dial and continuous shooting made it a reasonable sucess, its not perfect shooting 400 images stacks with a spider swinging in the air, i could rock my whole studio by moving my chair. i have no vibrations but can rock it ever so slightly as my studio is 2 floors up and sitting on 6 350mm dia telegraph poles 😁
These are extraordinary. I have no patience for macro work. Imagine being confronted with a human-sized version of that thing.
@DonaldB has written:This was tuff, there is no way you would shoot this shot with an electronic device, the spider was swiging by 2 strands and only the constant turn of the dial and continuous shooting made it a reasonable sucess, its not perfect shooting 400 images stacks with a spider swinging in the air, i could rock my whole studio by moving my chair. i have no vibrations but can rock it ever so slightly as my studio is 2 floors up and sitting on 6 350mm dia telegraph poles 😁
These are extraordinary. I have no patience for macro work. Imagine being confronted with a human-sized version of that thing.
i shoot all day to get 6 good images, some days i get nothing, depends how happy the spiders are, these ones are great, they runaround then make a web and hang there for hours, i can even shoot them with no glass cube , i was shooting a bug the other day and only just found out they are very deadly, lucky i have them caged in glass 😁
Evening in Prizren
My Balkan tour continues with a night stopover in Prizren, cultural heart of Kosovo. Looks like they could use a good electrician.
The trick is to try and put those wires to good compositional use, as you did in the second shot.
I have the same, problem in Italy with crazy wiring. Gabriel Basilico, a famous photographer here, was a master of making good use of them.
This was tuff, there is no way you would shoot this shot with an electronic device, the spider was swiging by 2 strands and only the constant turn of the dial and continuous shooting made it a reasonable sucess, its not perfect shooting 400 images stacks with a spider swinging in the air, i could rock my whole studio by moving my chair. i have no vibrations but can rock it ever so slightly as my studio is 2 floors up and sitting on 6 350mm dia telegraph poles 😁
Your spider shots are amazing as usual.
I posted an early evening shot from this viewpoint before, this is a little later.
Very cinematic, great combination of natural and artificial light.