Stars, Butterflies and Black & White

By shendyNo Comments
As the weather was nice, I took a half day on Friday and headed down to Dorset to camp for the night - the annual Perseid meteor shower was due to peak on Saturday night but I'd seen that the forecast wasn't great for then so tried to make the most of Friday. And it was well worth it - the skies were fantastically clear and I had a great view of the stars - and managed to see probably 20 Perseids over the course of a couple of hours until the moon rose just after 1am. This is the International Space Station And so is this - would have been a far better picture if I'd taken a bit more time to think about it and compose it properly. This is the only shot I got that includes a Perseid. I must have taken about 50 photos of the sky but this is the only one that caught something. Not as easy as...
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More stars

By shendyNo Comments
I got the opportunity to take some more star photos at the weekend when I camped in deepest darkest Dorset. This was better than France as there was no moon and even less light pollution - there were an incredible amount of stars on display. Tweaking the images a bit in Lightroom showed one thing - there is a huge amount of information hidden in those images. Check out the two copies of one image below - one as it came out of the camera, the other with auto-levels applied. The two long exposures were about 45 mins and have come out really well, but I think I need to experiment a bit more with the short exposures. 2 minutes at ISO400 is producing just a bit too much movement in the stars and makes the image look out of focus, so I probably need a shorter exposure - but that means a higher ISO and therefore more noise. More experimentation required...
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