Stars

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Colourful ones at that. The thought of sitting out in the dark, like really dark, like no moon dark and tripping over crabs kinda dark.. in spots away from people is not always on the top of my list of things to do – except for the away from people thing 🙂 however it is growing on me, maybe this year I will make more of an effort to get out and capture more the great night sky we have in this part of the world.

The weather was great, pleasantly warm and no clouds and great for the beach or pumping yabbies down the river, yep my arms are still sore :). But all this cloud free weather is not so great for colourful sunsets or sunrise however at the right time of the month, which it was, the moon is a late riser and its a perfect time to get out and see the stars. Chinamans beach is the north most accessible beach from the bombing range which extends for 20 kms or so before you reach Yamba and Iluka, This means looking south guarantees very little light pollution apart from the odd fishing trawler out to sea or the occasional fa/18 sortie on some training session 😉 the latter is pretty hard to miss and luckily fairly rare 🙂 I do also find it interesting that the whole range is located in the area called Bundjalung National Park but you cant get into most of it 🙂

Onto the stars, its amazing to see how much the colour the stars have and star trails are a great way to bring this out, by slightly underexposing the sky and stars means you retain the colour, in this case only the brightest star was over exposed, ie blinking on the highlights display.

This set of trail images is made up of about 30 images each with a shutter speed of 86 seconds @f2.8 (14mm) and ISO 400 with a separate single image for the foreground. The foreground image is only 30 seconds and was lit using a LED torch. The trail images are merged via layers in Photoshop by simply using 'lighten' as the blend mode.

I would have gone for a few hours more, but the promise of 6am wake up call from tickles and wallaby that besides scaring the shit outta me was taking way too much interest in me whilst munching the grass nearby.

I have arrived

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I Have Arrived - (c) Gerard Blacklock

I Have Arrived – (c) Gerard Blacklock
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm
Each trail image is 40.2s
Aperture: f/2.8
ISO 800
out front – sculptures by the sea art with a bit of EL wire and coloured torch

112 34 images, loaded into PS via statistics (maximum), cleaned up the plane trails and few annoying clouds then blended via the lighten mode.

Foreground shot is a separate image, from the same spot with some light painting.

Cheers to Rodney for reminding about this session – i only processed one picture from it last year 🙂

Exif / shot love:
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm
Each trail image is 40.2s
Aperture: f/2.8
ISO 800
out front – sculptures by the sea art with a bit of EL wire and coloured torch

The Ballet Tree

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So its been weeks since I have gotten a chance to get out and spend a bit of time taking some photo's, between work, kids and domestic duties its hard to even fit a Sunrise session in – I have now finally tested the Samyang 14mm for what I originally bought it for.. astro work 🙂

I had a recent job doing a bit of night chopper work, which gave me the opportunity to further scope out this super cool tree that i have seen many times times in the past but never really stopped to take a decent shot. Also +Michael Domaradzki had a cool perspective on it awhile back which triggered the idea for some astro stuff.

So, finally i got a leave pass for a night out and thought.. sweet as, i can go and take a sequence of images and spend a bit of quality time by myself, you know, soul searching/rejuvenation etc. and surely no one else is silly enough to head out in the freezing cold at night at this spot, even though it is in a city of 5 mil….

This is a bit of how it rolled – parked the car and there was no one there it was around 9 ish, got myself setup and taking a few preliminary shots and a young couple turned up :-/ sure.. this is where i would have brought all my potential hot dates lol… anyway happy to share my quiet time and space i suppose 🙂 Shortly there after a bunch of dudes in the their cars rock up and I am like.. yeah great this is gonna be trouble.. but no.. they just rolled out with some torches and freaked out when they saw someone else out, ie me 🙂 …and my torch was much bigger 😉 lol. so my night out with a bit solitude was not so solitary… oh well.

I did not quite nail the right position with the earths axis of rotation here, i was trying to get it directly behind the tree, the tree itself is actually quite small and the camera is positioned only a few metres from it, its probably a 3 metre tree which has been sculptured by the sea breeze. The light at the bottom right is the industrial lights over Kurnell on the edge of Botany Bay.

My original scope out image : https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/KKZ3uh7TgDE

Exif / shot love:
184 shots over the space of 2 hours.
Images are stacked in +Adobe Photoshop just using the lighten mode, the foreground/black image needed a bit of work to ensure it looked sensible with the background.
The side lighting is kindly provided by the SLSA Rescue base 🙂 could not have done it better myself, no additional torch lighting needed 🙂
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/3.2 and Shutter Speed: 50.5 seconds
ISO 500
out front – a very bendy tree and some cool stars

https://blog.avernus.com.au/the-ballet-tree/

Cosmic poo Cannon

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Cosmic Poo Cannon - (c) Gerard Blacklock D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/3.3 and Shutter Speed: 60.7 seconds (151 shots) ISO: 400

Cosmic Poo Cannon – (c) Gerard Blacklock
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/3.3 and Shutter Speed: 60.7 seconds (151 shots)
ISO: 400

stand back, we have a new means for waste water treatment

The cosmic poo cannon, during daylight hours can be seen here https://blog.avernus.com.au/prelude/

Given the time of month and the lack of moonage, i was keen to get out and do some star trails, without having to drive a million miles to a dark place. After the failed attempt from the previous week with Rodney, I was itching even more so. I had planned to get out during the week but the fickle weather prevented it.

I have had a few potential sites in the back of my mind for while, Sydney park, Kurnell (multiple poo cannons there), malabar and North Bondi (super poo cannon), after looking at a few older shots of the super poo cannon (https://blog.avernus.com.au/prelude/) it really looked as if it had lots of potential, with the only unknown being (beside never actually having visited there) being the amount of ambient light that may spill from the adjacent apartments and streets.

After a wonderful sunrise at Coogee (Ross jones pool) with Rodney and half of Sydneys other photographers ;( I mentioned it could be on the cards if the weather was on – the rest is history.

So here we have – Cosmic poo cannon
Taken in Australias largest city with probably some of the most light pollution around – just goes to show, you can do star trails pretty well anywhere 🙂

Techie stuff
151 images stacked together using the statistics method in Adobe PS CC
The foreground shot was just a simply red LED torch applied to the path leading up to the poo cannon.
Opted for longer shutter to reduce the file numbers (read as running outta disk space)

D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/3.3 and Shutter Speed: 60.7 seconds (151 shots)
ISO: 400
out front – North Bondi Water Treatment plant Exhaust stack.

Lovely jubbly and thanks for looking – I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed and always appreciate the time people take to have a look and/or comment.

Railway to the centre of the Galaxy

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the next train is leaving platform earth in …

Following on from the previous night Star Trail session (https://plus.google.com/100975265940134223422/posts/7dfL8PdWNbg), this time I opted for more data, like any engineer, more data is never a bad thing – this set of trails was over the space of 5 or so hours and included the moon rising in the early morning.

Its very interesting to see how the AutoWB deals with the scene as the light changes over the night, over the 5 hours there was about 4 really significant changes in the white balance, all which would have been easily sorted out if I had set a fixed WB. In the end it actually makes little or no difference to the actual trail set since alot of that data actually gets cancelled out.

Techie stuff
331 images stacked together using the statistics method in Adobe PS CC and yep it takes awhile
This time I shuffled the foreground shot to get things to line up and fullfill the iniital vision of the tracks leading right into the tip of the galaxy. This time I changed the shutter to a bit long 55 or so seconds, really this makes little difference but just meant things ended up pretty bright, I actually had to darken the sky considerably to get the trails to stand out the way I wanted.

D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 55.6 seconds (331 shots)
ISO: 3200
out front – long metal things commonly referred to as railway tracks.

Lovely jubbly and thanks for looking – I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed and always appreciate the time people take to have a look, plus and/or comment.

Cosmic Railway

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Its a dizzy ride to the centre of the galaxy

I learnt a few lessons from the last star trail session at the sandy side of Anna Bay, firstly.. go somewhere where there is no sand, tick. secondly set the timer correctly, tick
(note the malfunction from last time was actually due to the fact that I set the camera mode to single shot, this meant I missed an interval every shot and hence the 40 second gap between shots in my last one. It needs to be set to continuous low or high.
I still have a slight gap in the extreme view of the frame, but still better than the other attempt.

So with those key points addressed – for the next star trail session I think i need the following.. warmer location :), set the white balance to something consistent 😉 and take care of local wildlife or farm animals 😉 There was a cow terrorising this railway the following morning 🙂

This was a set of images from a fairly short time period, just over 2 hours, I do have another set at over 5 hours, however the moon rose within that period and there was some pretty funky autoWB changes throughout that set, thats for a rainy day processing session!

techie stuff
192 images stacked together using the statistics method in Adobe PS CC
(see here https://plus.google.com/100975265940134223422/posts/VnN5muFSypj)
The foreground image included a bit more on the bottom which gave me the ability to get a slight vertical pano shot happening.

D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 45.5 seconds
ISO: 3200
out front – long metal things commonly referred to as railway tracks.

Lovely jubbly and thanks for looking – I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed and always appreciate the time people take to have a look, plus and/or comment.

The Stuttering Trail

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don't stare into the vortex
Damn I hate equipment malfunctions, well it was probably a operator error, however it does feell better to blame it on the equipment…on the topic on things that crap me off, writing a post on gplus and to only have it disappear by pressing the backspace button a few times or something, very irritating, you would think that google in therr wisdom (like in gmail or docs) would have an auto save function when writing a 21 billion word post, cause it gets a bit annoying having to rewrite it… 😉 oh also while I am at it, how about a input box that your can resize ? its like typing on your mobile phone when your actually in front of a bazillion inch screen lol.
rant end.

Star Trails are actually pretty easy to create, simply find a nice dark spot out on a moonless night and plonk ya camera down on a tripod. Point it somewhere in the vicinity of south and take a few shots every now and then, best to leave it and come back a few hours later, or better still come back the next and hope your camera is still there and some clown has not pinched it 😉

Adobe PS CC makes it pretty easy to create the image from the 14.5 billion images you took while the camera was sitting out waiting to be stolen, CC now has the Statistics function built in, simply load your images up in file>scripts>statistics and using the maximum option zap them together for some trail fun.
Alternatively just use the load files into stack option and zap(blend) them together using the lighten mode, don't forget to whack in your nice foreground shot.

The foregound shot can simply be a shot taken at dusk to get the scene nicely illuminated or you can get you torch out for some funky light painting. But, and a big but, if you do light paint (and this is very important and error that many make) be sure to do it off the camera position (at least a dozen steps away) and get low, this will help create texture in the scene (see here https://plus.google.com/100975265940134223422/posts/d5z6TCzuzRj) and give your scene depth.

techie stuff
D7000 coupled with a pre sand filled Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 40 seconds
ISO: 1250
out front – absolutely nothing buts lots of wind and plenty of sand.
to the left – white coloured LED torch.

Lovely jubbly and thanks for looking – I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed and always appreciate the time people take to have a look, plus and/or comment.