Sleep is for sheep: More night photography!

July 3, 2008 | Category: Photography

I’ve had some pretty heavy bags under my eyes for the past few days as a result of my late night habit of staying out until 3am doing night photography. Last night a buddy and I drove up to Virginia City, NV—a preserved 1800s mining town— and shot an old church.

On Monday night I joined a small group of friends for some late night shooting at Lake Tahoe. Our original plan was to try and locate Banzai Rock (in which we failed miserably), so we decided to shoot near sand harbor instead.

The 180 degree panorama on the left is the result of five photos stitched vertically. My D300 was set to ISO 3200 to pull off 30 sec exposures at f/2.8. The lens was a Tokina 11-16mm 2.8.

The very bright ball of light rising above the trees, on the left is Jupiter.

The final photo (below) is yet another star streak photo over Tahoe, taken at the same time as the panorama. I stacked for an hour using 30 second exposures with the 10.5mm fisheye (which I am on the verge of using too much) at f/2.8. The foreground exposure was taken in RAW for 10 mins at f4 (for more depth of field) with noise reduction turned on. The exposures were later combined in Photoshop. Later on, I may post a rectalinear corrected version (meaning the fisheye effect is removed using software) just for fun. The photo isn’t finished, if you look closely you can see plane streaks and I’m not too sure about the color.

Well, thats all for now, comments welcome…

Tags: Dan Newton, fisheye, Lake tahoe, Milky Way, Night photography, Nv, Panorama, Photo, photographer, Reno, star, stars, streaks, vertical pano, Virginia City

3 Comments

Asa
on July 3rd, 2008
1
DAMN, but that vertical pano is FINE!
Randy Jones
on July 9th, 2008
2
Excellent images, very creative.
noart
on July 12th, 2008
3
I’m not a big fan of curved straight lines (a-la fish-eye), but combined with the curved star-trails they look fine! I like the last image very much, congrats!