Covid-19 is seriously impairing travel. While the job that pays the bills used to come with lots of business travel, I’ve been restricted to work from home since beginning of March. Also private travel is significantly reduced in Europe, and the streets of Nuremberg haven’t seen many visitors either. But our night sky has been graced by a very special visitor from outer space, comet Neowise. Properly socially distanced, it passed our planet at a distance of 103 million km or 64 million miles.
“Good friends are like stars, you don’t always see them, but you know they’re always there”, an old saying goes.
A Milky Way shot to open the photography year 2020. Taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and the mZuiko 7-14mm F/2.8. Image specs 20 sec (camera on a tripod) @ f/2.8 , ISO 3200 and 7mm focal length.
Postprocessing of the RAW in Lightroom Classic – mainly using haze reduction and increasing clarity in parts of the Milky Way, plus some overall sharpness masking and noise reduction.
The second day of Christmas. Downtime. All is calm, all is bright. In Pajamas all day. Watching TV documentaries. Couch sleeping (a lot). Playing with some photographs taken during the year, like this night shot from Boccadasse, Genoa. Just imagining, how the little port would look without light pollution.
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I hope your are all having a fantastic Christmas as well.
There were too many clouds in the southern sky. We were enjoying a great dinner with friends and family out on the patio on a warm summer night. Everyone was exited to see the total lunar eclipse. At 22:30, as announced, the International Space Station ISS appeared as a brightly glowing spot out of the North, passing directly overhead before vanishing behind the clouds. We almost gave up hope. But then, all of a sudden, the sky cleared and we had a perfect view of the eclipse. By the time I grabbed the tripod and my Oly, walked a few hundred yards to an open field and set up shop, the moon was already starting to move out of the Earth’s shadow.
The photo was taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the 40-150 F/2.8 Pro Zoom with the MC 14 converter attached, giving me a 210mm focal length (equals 420mm in full frame). Image specs are 1/8 sec @ f/4 and ISO 1600. Cropped, curve adjustments and slight sharpening of the RAW was done in Lightroom Classic CC.
The Namibian night sky is spectacular. Last night at Gondwana Canyon Village I had a first try at shooting the stars. I took this image right next to the cottage we were staying in.
Camera was the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 12mm F/2 wide angle prime. I put the camera on a tripod, set the 12 second self timer (to avoid camera shake) and dialed in a 60 second exposure time at F/3.2 and ISO 400. I manually focused the lens to infinity. These are good starting points for some trial and error. For composition (as it was pitch dark in the direction I was looking) I lit the rocks with a torch while positioning the camera on the tripod, then turned off the light while taking the image. The lighting on the rocks came from the small walkway lights in my back of Gondwana Canyon Village, so I did not need to manually paint the foreground with my torch.
In lightroom I increased the white point to bring out the details in the milky way, opened the shadow up a tad, then adjusted the grad curves until I was happy with the results.
At next opportunity I will try a reduced shutter speed (like 1/30 sec) to make the stars more crisp while turning up the ISO a bit.
