Excuses, excuses - Joani Edition
Right before we were to head off to Texas to attend An and Kit’s wedding, our niece Joani, sent us an email. To summarize, her elder son Benny (yes, every time we hear the name the opening beats of Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets” kicks into my brain, followed by the screaming falsetto, “Benny, Benny, Benny, B-B-Benny and the Jets!”) is really fascinated with all things space, and she was wondering if we had any photographs showing stars and stuff she might be able to use to decorate Benny’s room with.
We of course were in the midst of getting ready for international travel and really didn’t have time to comb through our libraries and, to be honest, we didn’t expect to find much of anything because we’ve always been a bit disappointed with our efforts to create such images. Anyway, Ann did take some time to check out NASA’s site and, like the Library of Congress for old, FSA depression-era photographs, found out they had a plethora of images one can freely download and use. (Personally, I think it’s a great use of our tax dollars to make such things available.).
Ann sent that off to Joani and we were off to Texas.
Flash forward a couple of months and, you guessed it, I hadn’t even thought about Joani’s email until Ann remind me about our commitment with Tina. Well, after working on the Tina images, I got to thinking . . . did I really have nothing to send to Joani? Joani has always commented on our images and how she’s liked them, so I decided it would be the responsible thing for me to check them out and see if there was anything worthwhile. I mean she is family . . . that’s as good an excuse as any to go digging around a bit!
There are several problems with astrophotography that Ann and I never quite found a way to overcome. First, is that we are really more interested in landscapes than the stars, but if you want to include the landscape, you either have to photograph with a near-full moon to record the landscape, which lessens the effect of the stars, or you make multiple exposures (one of the landscape during the day and, without moving the camera at all, one of the stars at night) and combine the photos. Otherwise, you’re stuck with silhouette landscapes. We’re not interested in the combination approach, or with using flash or a flashlight to “paint” the landscape (though we tried that . . . quite unsuccessfully), so we eventually resorted to using the moon as a light source.
Some of our efforts are ok, but just barely. They might make for a decent image when viewed very small, but that’s about it.
To dive into the technical stuff (read: “problems”), the quality of our sensors (smaller than full frame, and now 4 generations old) meant that we got noise in our images. A lot of noise. Which makes enlarging them difficult in that the image is . . . unpleasant to look at.
There are other technical issues such as the fact that, while we tend not to notice it, the stars are constantly moving. So it’s not so easy to get stars that appear as the pin-pricks of light the eye sees. Leave the shutter open too long and they start to blur a bit. Wider angle lenses give you a bit more time than normal or telephoto lenses, but really, not long enough. So the ready solution to that is to crank up the ISO which, . . . leads to even more noise.
And we discovered that for some reason, when you have a real distant view, the image looks a bit soft. My suspicion is that it’s a result of atmospheric disturbance - the heat from the earth rising into the chilling night air. The effect seems more pronounced in the images taken late at night (below) as opposed to very, very early in the morning (above). Maybe I’m wrong, but there is something I could’t quite work out about many of the images.
And, in case you were wondering, that white pin-prick on the face of El Capitan to the left of the image above is a climber’s headlamp. Either they are climbing at midnight, or bivouacked on the cliff face for the night. There may be nobody at Tunnel View at midnight, but they sure are on the face of El Capitan.
Anyway, I went through my images - mostly from 2014, 2015 and 2016 when Ann and I were experimenting with night photography. In some ways they’re as fun to look at as they were to make, but they are definitely technically challenged.
Try as we did, there was always one source of difficulty or another that we just never got to overcoming. It’s an area of photography that requires a certain technical expertise that both Ann and I decided we did not wish to pursue. We still make the occasional late night or very early image, but we no long really plan for it.
It’s always nice to be out in wild places in the middle of the night enjoying the landscape, but we’ve long given up the idea of making stunning images at night. The few efforts where you can truly see the Milky Way (none included here because . . . they are, in a word, bad), you see nothing of the landscape. Photograph with the moon as a light source and the sky is really no more than a blank canvas with a bunch of pinpricks. We may try again in the future, to see if our sensors can handle it better, but I suspect making good images would require a range of different technical skills that Ann and I won’t be trying to acquire. We’ll focus on our landscapes and making images at the edges of day and night.
So I sent the images I had that passed a certain muster, but none were really what I would call exceptional. I did, however, throw in one final image, not really of stars but of the moon. An image that I consider a good image.
In the end, all ll I could do is try.
Some of the images cleaned up a bit better than I’d expected, but as much as it was fun to revisit the images, I’m pretty confident in saying that I am not going to become an astrophotographer.