Happy Thanksgiving: Hybrid Eclipse

Life has been just a teensy bit busy, and this is likely to be the last blog post for another year or so.  But since then, I've done some more sky photography I thought I'd share; this of the hybrid eclipse:

Enjoy; there's little commentary to be added here, except they were all shot with the Hoya ND filter, the 400mm f/5.6 AI-S lens. It was pretty chilly that morning—I was out by 6:45 to try to get the shots; it was about five hours' worth of sleep, since we fell back an hour that day.

Venus Transit

Well, it happened.  The last transit of Venus until 2117.  The viewing weather locally was pretty awful:  all clouds and little sunshine.  My dad's telescope was out, but saw nothing.

I paired my 400mm Nikkor (the old AI-S f/5.6 IF-ED version of the lens; not anything newer) with the D7000 and the Hoya ND400 (9-stop) filter, and I managed to pull out two shots between the clouds:

5 June 2012 18:16 EDT

5 June 2012 18:19 EDT

While the results were relatively meager, it was a successful use of the filter, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can do with it in the future.  The weeks have been busy lately, and I'm hoping to get out to take more photos soon.  I have been continuing to work on my raw workflow, too.  More pictures after the jump.

Over-developed Attempts with TC-301

I've made my first attempts with the TC-301.  The results are a bit over-developed, but as a start it's probably not too bad:

400 (800) mm f/5.6 @ f/8(16), 1/100s, ISO 200

Upcoming Celestial Events

There's an annular eclipse coming up in May, and Venus will transit in front of the Sun in June.  The transit in particular is of some interest, since the planet will not make the transit again for over 100 years.  Hopefully I'll be dead when that happens.  While I didn't set out to do astrophotography when I bought my camera, I'm considering picking up a solar filter and a teleconverter (probably a TC-300 to mate to the 400mm—turning it into a 1200mm- f/11-equivalent lens on my d7000) to try to capture both events.  I'll probably do some tests on the Moon if I make the purchases.  I'm also considering extension tubes, which could have some interesting effects on the 400 as well, particularly in macro ranges.

More Moon Work

So I'm still getting started with the raw workflow.  The issues of noise and other artifacts come up pretty often when I'm working on the moon pictures, especially at 400mm.  The 70-300 seems like its not as sharp, but it also handles the noise a lot better.  I don't shoot with it anymore, so there's no definite side-by-side comparison.

I processed another photo today of the moon with RawTherapee, emphasizing better noise reduction (luminance, chrominance, and so on).  Here's the result:

400mm, 1/800s, f/11.0 @ ISO 200

For reference, here's the other processed image; it's a bit sharper, and the exposure compensation is obviously different:

The Moon, Again

With the full moon and a clear sky last night, I couldn't resist taking a few moments:

400mm @ f/11, 1/800s, ISO 200

In the raw processing, I added about 3.5 stops of exposure and did some denoising.  This lost a little definition, but the atmosphere was definitely getting in the way of a noiseless shot.  After the import, I applied very slight curves adjustment and an unsharp mask.

The 400 really is a swell lens.  I shot at f/11 to see if I could get a sharper image than I've gotten shooting at f/5.6, but it doesn't appear to have made much difference.  This isn't too surprising, since I'm shooting a crop sensor and holding pretty steady in the center of the imagine.

This was shot hand-held.

Focal Length and Compression

It's been awhile since I've been writing here.  This isn't because I haven't taken any pictures—it's because I have little time in my personal life to write much of anything, to say nothing of a photography blog.

However, I recently acquired a Nikkor 400mm f/5.6 AI-S and 85mm f/1.8 (AI'd).  Manual focus isn't everyone's thing, but I have enjoyed it a fair amount, and these are focal lengths of some interest to me, and help to illustrate how the longer focal length tends to "compress" a scene.

Here's a picture from the 85:

Fire hydrant?  85mm f/2.8, 1/5000s @ ISO 400

While they're not super obvious, there are clearly buildings in the background some distance away.  A somewhat equivalent picture from the 400:

400mm f/5.6, 1/1600s @ ISO 800

I did not take the most extreme care to ensure that the scenes were identical, but hopefully the compression is fairly obvious.  The background "feels" so much closer in this image than it does in the previous.  This is due to the compression induced by the focal length.  What this means is that the longer focal length (i.e., telephoto lens) tends to bring the background closer while the shorter focal length (i.e., wider angle) will present a scene with greater depth.


And just to make you jealous, a moon shot from the 400; it's cropped, run through unsharp, and has been color corrected some:

400mm f/8, 1/1000s @ 800 ISO; hand-held

Another View of Polaris

I meant to post this quite some time ago, but as it happens, my schedule and mind aren't always conducive:

This was my second effort at playing with the intervalometer. This time I didn't shoot RAW because of how long it took to do the batch conversion (nearly 8 hours on my netbook; and yes, I know I shouldn't use a netbook for that purpose).

This time it was the 50mm f/1.8 at f/3.5, ISO 1250, 15-second exposures. White balance was set at 3030K in camera to provide bluer affect and mitigate some of the warming tones from light pollution. One picture taken every 30s from midnight to 5 AM.

Again, I kept Polaris in view, but this time shifted down slightly. The more limited field of view is less satisfying than the wider angle, although the detail is sharper. I'll probably try another using the 28mm f/3.5 at 3.5 to see if it is any good.

I haven't had much time since then to work with the intervalometer, but I'm curious to see how a smaller field of view might work with a longer lens like the 70–300 VRII.

Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 AF-S VR

As I'm planning on traveling a fair amount this year, I leapt on the chance to get this lens at almost half off MSRP when I found a refurbished one available online.

If you've shot with me for any length of time, you know that I prefer prime lenses to zooms, mostly because it helps me think more about composition. Primes also have the advantage of being lighter, faster, and generally smaller than their zooming cousins.

That said, there are times when your feet won't get you there, and zooms are undeniably handy for their convenience. I had the DX 18-200mm VR super-zoom and rarely used it, and I gave my DX 55-200mm (part of a trade+cash sale of the 18-200) to my sister with the d40. I opted to get this FX monster as the replacement.

Testing the D7000's Intervalometer

Pardon the noise pollution:

Just a test of the d7000's intervalometer. Shot with a 28mm f3.5 AI-S at f5.6, ISO 1000. 30-second exposures at one-minute intervals beginning at midnight and ending around 5:30am.

Raw conversion was done using ucraw. Manual WB setting in camera was 3030K for a blue affect but automatically adjusted by UCRaw to somewhere north of 4000K. Exposure compensation was adjusted +1.5 stops during the batch process.

The light pollution is obviously pretty bad. I kept this because I accidentally pointed at Polaris. I'll try this again, but most likely with my 50mm f/1.8 and shoot a bit more wide-open (say f/2.8) with more frequent intervals and shorter exposure times.

Full video here (I notice the video is basically black on the blog).