Taylor's Photoblog

Unexpected

Posted by Taylor (St. Louis, United States) on 11 May 2012 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

This was only meant to be a test for the program deepskystacker but turned out much better than I had hoped!

I am going on a road trip to Nevada this summer to photograph the Milky Way and wanted to test the program deepskystacker to see if it is something that may be useful. I am currently living in Kansas City where I can hardly see any stars so I jumped on the highway and drove with nowhere in mind until I came across this field right as the sun was setting. I took several exposures of the sunset and used Nik to create an HDR. I then waited until the sun set completely and took 13 thirty second exposures of the stars along with some dark and bias frames. After DSS did its work on the stars to eliminate the noise I blended the star photo with the HDR shot in PS and exported to Lightroom to add the finishing touches. The starburst that Venus (at least I believe it was Venus) is creating is because dew had started to form on my lens which I had not noticed until after shooting. It worked out in my favor!

I suppose now that I think about most of my favorite shots have come when I least expected it. This turned out to be no exception. Hopefully I am as lucky in Nevada.

I also have to give credit to another forum member. I had seen someone else blend a night and day shot a year or two ago on aminus3 and decided to give it a try. I looked for that shot but cannot remember who had taken it. If anyone remembers this picture please let me know so I can give them a shout out for the idea!