Skyscape - David Mathre Photography

Tuesday (16-August-2011) — New Jersey

Backyard Summertime Clouds and Landscape in New Jersey.

After the Storm. It has been raining a lot since last Saturday night. The storm system is finally leaving. I hoped to get a rainbow, but had to settle for a landscape view from my backyard. But then again, it is not often I can take a landscape image with weather/clouds from my backyard. The image was taken with a Leica X1. The first version of the image is the “out of the camera” JPG. The next two were the Leica X1 version of RAW (Adobe DNG) that were processed with Capture One Pro 6 and Photoshop CS5. The main difference between these two images was the white balance). The final image was converted to B&W using Nik Silver Efex Pro.

Let me know which you like best.

Storm Departing -- Backyard Summer Landscape. Image taken with a Leica X1 (ISO 100, 24 mm, f/5.6. 1/800 sec). Out of the camera JPG. (David J. Mathre) — Storm Departing — Backyard Summer Landscape. Image taken with a Leica X1 (ISO 100, 24 mm, f/5.6. 1/800 sec). Out of the camera JPG.

Storm Departing -- Backyard Summer Landscape. Image taken with a Leica X1 (ISO 100, 24 mm, f/5.6. 1/800 sec). Raw image processed with Capture One Pro, Nik Define, and Photoshop CS5. Converted to BW with Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. (David J. Mathre) — Storm Departing — Backyard Summer Landscape. Image taken with a Leica X1 (ISO 100, 24 mm, f/5.6. 1/800 sec). Raw image processed with Capture One Pro, Nik Define, and Photoshop CS5. Converted to BW with Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

Saturday (13-August-2011) — New Jersey

Backyard Summertime Night Sky Over New Jersey.

Perseid Meteor Shower. Conditions for viewing the Perseid Meteors this year were not good. The moon was full with relatively high humidity and some clouds. I set two cameras up to take images overnight, and got maybe three images of meteors. I’ve made a time-lapse movie from the two image sets.

As a side note, I am running out of hard disk space. I could get another WD My Book external drive, but have run out of USB and Firewire ports on my computer. I’m thinking about a Dobro disk array. What ever I do, I also need to maintain an off-site backup copy. I worry about some of the cloud options, both due to cost and the fact that ATT limits me to 5 GB/month of broadband internet access.

Perseid Meteor and Bright Full Moon. Summer Night in New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D3 and 16 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens (ISO 400, 16 mm, f/2.8, 25 sec). (David J Mathre) — Perseid Meteor and Bright Full Moon. Summer Night in New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D3 and 16 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens (ISO 400, 16 mm, f/2.8, 25 sec).

Perseid Meteor. Summer Night in New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D3s and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E lens (ISO 800, 24 mm, f/4, 29 sec). (David J Mathre) — Perseid Meteor. Summer Night in New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D3s and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E lens (ISO 800, 24 mm, f/4, 29 sec).

Friday (12-August-2011) — New Jersey

Backyard Summertime Nature in New Jersey.

Soaring Turkey Vulture. This week Thom Hogan has been publishing reviews of Nikon “Exotic” lenses. By Exotic, he is referring to the big telephoto lenses: 200 mm f/2, 300 mm f/2.8, 400 mm f/2.8, 500 mm f/4, and 600 mm f/4. In the reviews, he really likes the 400 mm f/2.8. I have an earlier version of the 400 mm f/2.8 D II (before VR or VR II). I decided to take it out this afternoon. Rather than showing some more images of the local deer, I’ll share an image of a soaring turkey vulture. The image was taken hand-held (yes this is a heavy lens (4620 g, nearly 10 lbs) — and even heavier when you add-on the camera body). The image is cropped significantly as the vulture was soaring well above the house.

Turkey Vulture Soaring. Summer in New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D3x and 400 mm f/2.8 D II lens (ISO 100, 400 mm, f/2.8, 1/2500). Raw image processed with Capture One Pro 6, Nik Define 2, and Photoshop CS5. (David J Mathre) — Turkey Vulture Soaring. Image taken with a Nikon D3x camera and 400 mm f/2.8 D II lens (ISO 100, 400 mm, f/2.8, 1/2500). Raw image processed with Capture One Pro 6, Nik Define 2, and Photoshop CS5.

If the sky stays clear tonight, I will try some full moon images with this lens (alone and with the TC-E III 20 teleconverter), and some star-trails looking for Perseid meteor trails.

Thursday (11-August-2011) — New Jersey

Backyard Summertime Night Sky Over New Jersey.

Multi-Exposure View of the Waxing Gibbous Moon. I went out last night to see about setting up a camera to do some star trails and possibly catch some Perseid meteor trails. I gave up because of the bright waxing gibbous moon (90% illuminated) and some fast-moving clouds. After midnight, it did clear up long enough to get this multi-exposure view of the moon. I set it up for 2 minutes between exposure. I think I need to go to 2.5 minutes for no overlap for a full moon.

Multi-Exposure of Waxing Gibbous Moon over New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D3x and 500 mm f/4 VR telephoto lens (ISO 400, 500 mm, f/4 1/400 sec). Nine images taken at 2 minute intervals. Raw image processed with Capture One Pro 6, and Photoshop CS5.. (David J Mathre) — Multi-Exposure of Waxing Gibbous Moon over New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D3x camera and 500 mm f/4 VR telephoto lens (ISO 400, 500 mm, f/4 1/400 sec). Nine images taken at 2 minute intervals. Raw image processed with Capture One Pro 6, and Photoshop CS5.

Monday (01-August-2011) — New Jersey

Backyard Summer Nighttime Sky Over New Jersey.

Star Trails and Lens Distortion. One problem I had with the star trail image I just published was that the circles looking toward the north star were not exactly round. This is probably due to the non-linear distortions characteristics of wide-angle lenses, especially toward the edges. There is a program, DxO Optics Pro that corrects for distortion of various cameras and lenses. (Note that the current version of Adobe Camera Raw also does lens corrections for some camera/lens pairs, but not for the Nikon D3s camera and 24 mm f/1.4G lens used for this image). I used the DxO Optics program to process and correct the 328 images. It took over 12 hours for DxO to process all of these images.I then ran the reprocessed images with startrails.exe program. Let me know (comment, or send me an e-mail) if you think the resultant image looks better, no different, or worse.