The Milky Way and millions of other stars above Mt St. Helens and a field of summer wildflowers. Mt St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Washington, June 2013.
This is an image from last summer that I'm just getting around to processing now. This image was created about 1-2 hours after my image titled,
"Awakening". When I shoot these scenes, I like to capture the wildflowers during the twilight hour (at lowish ISOs) and then capture the stars later in the evening (at higher ISOs). I then manually blend the images together using Photoshop. On this particular evening, it took me longer than expected to find a good comp for the wildflowers, so it was getting quite dark when I finally started shooting the flowers. This meant I had to use a higher ISO than I would have preferred for the wildflowers. Overall it's still a usable image, but it will probably be a challenge to make a huge print! I'm still amazed by what the latest dSLRs are capable of capturing in low light settings.
Nikon D800, Nikkor 14-24 at 14mm
4 image blend for DOF and dynamic range
10 sec at f/2.8, ISO 3200 x3 for the flowers - at twilight
15 sec at f/2.8, ISO 3200 for the stars and mountain - 45 minutes later
Thanks for any feedback or comments you have. Please check out the larger version.
Comments
22 commentsI know nothing about making these kind of images but to my eye this is spectacular. Love the scene and the beautiful colors.
pat
Jared - thanks for sharing your thoughts on the sky color. Getting the sky to look right is always the biggest challenge for me with these night shots. I kept a fair amount of magenta/purple in the sky since I liked how it complimented the foreground flowers. When I try to reduce the magenta, the sky starts to look brown, which I don't like. I'm curious to hear what the others think about the sky.
Yiming - that fireball on the right hand side is the light pollution from the Portland/Vancouver metro area. If everyone finds it too distracting, I will work on trying to tone it down a bit.
Just a tad warmer, an easy fix if you desire, but fine as is…..
I certainly appreciate your persistence to create a nice image.
--P
Nick Bristol
Lone Rock, WI
John
This would, also, be almost as spectacular cropped just above the flowers, if you wanted a square crop.
About using ISO 3200 for the flowers I say: why the heck not? The D800 can do amazing things at high ISO's. All you need is about a 30 setting in your luminence noise in RAW and you're good to go.
One question: why the high ISO for the flowers? Was it windy?
Kory: Yes, the D800 is very impressive, even at high ISO. I had to use ISO 3200 because of a slight breeze that would move all of the flowers significantly about every 30 seconds. I did some longer exposures at lower ISOs, but the flowers were all over the place. I ended up having to shoot the flowers at f/2.8, ISO 3200 for 10 seconds. Luckily using these settings, I was able to capture 3 images (for DOF) for the flowers with virtually no movement. Not ideal, but it worked!