David's Images of the Day Photoblog
While reviewing images from last night, I found one where I captured a firefly flashing. So far it is early in the firefly season and I hope to get more images before the season ends.
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Comparison of Digital Noise Reduction Programs. Pre-dawn view of the Moon, Venus (and Mercury) over the Pacific Ocean. Professor Ian Campbell had us look for the moon and several planets in close proximity. Here are a couple of images taken with a Nikon D3x and 85 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 1600, 85 mm, f/1.4, 1/30 sec). I needed the high ISO to even get a 1/30 sec exposure since it was still dark and the ship was moving. For each image I processed with no digital noise reduction, then with either NIK Define 2.0 or Topaz DeNoise 5.0.
The following image is a composite of five 30 minute night sky exposures taken during a Elderhostel/Road Scholar photography workshop at Kelly Place outside of Cortez, Colorado in 2008. It was really dark other than the Christmas lights at the main building, and you could see a lot of stars in the sky. I moved the tripod as far away from the lights as possible and decided to do this series with a fisheye lens that would give a 180° field of view. The five images were combined using Startrails. This program is old (only works with jpg or 8-bit tif files) but works better than when I try to merge the images as layers in Photoshop.
Individual images in this slide show can be viewed here.
Since everyone was tired from the long hike yesterday, we decided to take day 7 as a relatively light day to rest. This gave me the opportunity to do some early morning night sky imaging. This was good in that the weather forecast was for us to start seeing more clouds. I went out at about 03:00, knowing that it would start getting light sometime after 04:00. The further south we go, the shorter the nights!
As the sun started coming up, I got more images of Fitzroy from within walking distance of the Hosteria. After a leisurely lunch at El Pilar, we went into town and on the way back stopped at the Chorrilla del Salto waterfall for some photographic instruction. A lot of the local residence were using the waterfall to cool down on a hot summer Sunday afternoon.
While eating dinner at the Hosteria with a view of Fitzroy we observed a beautiful display of pastel colored clouds. Everyone stopped eating before the dessert could be served and ran to get a camera (if they didn’t have one with them). The view was magical.
November Full Moon — Also known as the Beaver Moon or Harvest Moon. 1) Image acquired with a Nikon D3x camera and 400 mm f/2.8 with TC-E 20 teleconverter (ISO 100, 800 mm, f/8, 1/250 sec). 2) Image acquired with a Nikon D3s camera and 400 mm f/2.8 with TC-E 20 teleconverter (ISO 200, 800 mm, f/16, 1/100 sec).
