Thanks Bigsmoke! It was more of the hula hoop that caused the pattern, my shutter was long enough to catch it. It makes me want to go out and buy a light stick to try light painting with but I can't justify it right now; I was told each hula hoop was $300 and there were about 2 or 3 different ones.

Very nice Womp Womp! I'm a huge sky fan and wish there were some more clouds in the sky to make it interesting but nonetheless, the colors are incredible and the details look really clear!

So, about one or two years ago, my father bought himself a Sony Cyber-shot DSC HX400V Bridge camera. Since then, he also purchased a Canon reflex camera, so he left the Sony for me to play with. I was already a bit familiar with it by then, but that's when I truly started experimenting.

Here's one of the nicer shots I happened to make:



This was captured on April 29th 2017, right out of my window.
1200mm, ISO 80, 1/25, f/6.3. No real post processing, I only centered it and added some more of a black border.

Oh, wow. That's a glorious shot Nik! Nothing wrong with adding more of black space around it, that extra space around it really adds to the photo.


This here is a 111MP panorama (10MP uploaded) stitched from 29 photos.

Car Panorama by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

That looks really awesome, and the stitching (which I'm assuming was done by computer) is seamless!

Why do you need such detail for a bunch of random cars?

Because they are sweet cars and it looks really nice, I think.

Thanks! Yeah. I made the mistake of not switching my camera to full manual exposure so each photo was exposed slightly differently, so I had to bump the exposure up on about half. There's is one error that's obvious in this picture (I didn't match the exposure perfectly for one photo) and then some very small details that are noticeable at 100% zoom where the program didn't stitch the images together very well.
The count goes up to 30 but I had to retake #25 because of minor discrepancy. And the count on the folder view is 61 because even though the program is non-destructive, I still edit copies (hence all the 2's in white boxes and the "1 of 2" on that one thumbnail.)



For someone who enjoys photography it's almost like you don't know how stitching photos creates a bigger photo. So, let's do a run down.

A phone camera is around 12MP these days and they do take panoramas. One regular photo from the phone will be 12MP because it's 4000x3000 pixels but when the camera takes a panorama creating a photo that's 4000 pixels tall and an arbitrary number of pixels wide. It doesn't then force that photo down to 12 megapixels. So, a panorama at 10k pixels wide will create a 40MP photo.

Same idea here. My camera has a 20MP sensor. This panorama is comprised of 29 photos, despite that this photo is not 580MP in size. There's plenty of overlap in each photo to ensure lens distortion and other factors are mitigated, as well as ensuring the program (and myself if required) has enough information to align and order the photos. Ideally you want something like a third of overlap but I went with half overlap going across and a third of overlap top to bottom.

The cars are visible in the top, middle and, bottom photos and when going left to right I positioned the edge of the frame in the center of the next photo. So when it's all said and done I am left with a 111MP photo.

But why do a panorama instead of back up more or use a wider angle lens? I couldn't really back up anymore due to various obstacles behind me and I couldn't use a wider lens because the distortion would not have made an attractive photo from that distance. My wide angle is more for capturing a vast landscape rather than subjects ~12 feet in front of me. PLUS, the cars on the outside would have looked smaller due to the nature of "extreme" wide angle lenses. There's also the fact that I still wouldn't have been able to get back far enough to have adequate buffer on either side of the line up.

So, that left a panorama. On the plus side, now the car club has a high enough resolution photo to get printed on a poster at 300DPI if they ever want to. I particularly am not fond of this photo and think a photo for a poster should be more prepared. So I hope they invite me back and we can set up a proper photoshoot for a poster. Maybe I'll take the time and make it bigger, heading into the 200 or 300MP range.

It's not like I wanted to take a 100+MP photo, it was just my only option. But now I wanna take a larger one.

Fun facts about this photo for anyone who is interested:
15518x7181 pixels (111,434,758 pixels total, or technically 111.4MP)
f/7.1 and 28mm of zoom (on a 24-105mm lens)
29 photos (755.6MB total)
Panorama consumes 417MB of disk space

How am I going to take a 200+MP photo?
By zooming in! I plan to get them all lined up and get a tripod on wheels or something. Roll down the line of cars to prevent distortion and maybe zoom in to about 50mm or so. I'm not sure how many passes it'll take but if each car is like 3 photos long and they have the full club out of ~12 cars. I'll also probably have about 6 images top to bottom. That's 72 photos now plus maybe a few extra to pad the sides of the images, so 84 total?

That'll give me roughly 1,680,000,000 pixels to work with (or 1,680MP). If the example above is anything to go by, where 580MP were merged into a 111MP pano, I should be somewhere around 290-300MP.

It's something I'll have to work on as I've never really taken panoramas on a DSLR before - it's all been on my phone - so I'll probably start by doing photos of my cars for practice and then scaling that up to the car club.

Went for a 75 mile drive to escape the city light as best we could last night. This night has been weeks in both preparation and planning. I started really getting serious on New Years when I photographed myself out in the woods near Yosemite. I've gone out at least twice a month starting in April to practice star photos and then starting in June photographing the Milky Way. I'm hoping to continue this every month until September.

I first photographed the Milky Way last year but only had the one photo to work with so I knew I had to photograph it more so I could have a good sample size of photos to get familiar with. I tried making a preset in my editor to speed up the process but that's proving useless. The places I went to were about 20 miles North of a major city, which is unfortunate because the Milky Way rises in the South so I was never able to escape the light pollution. Which is why I drove 75 miles away this time.

The next major city was about 120 miles away. I was positive I'd get some light pollution but I didn't get any. It was great. However, we did encounter fog. A lot of it. You can see it in the photo below and we had to abandon our main stop because of it. We were driving through some thick fog, couldn't see probably 50 feet in front of us, and as we rounded a corner the fog just vanished. It was incredible. We stopped so we could stop and evaluate our position, such as do we stay where we are or keep going forward? We stopped because we could see the fog return about 3 miles in front of us. It was weird, we saw the fog going down the mountain behind us, out over the ocean then, back up the mountain in front of us. It was one of the coolest weather things I've ever seen.

So, we continue on. Hoping either our final stop is before the fog returns or after the fog. We stop right at the edge, about enter the veil of fog. It wasn't gunna work. On top of that it was windy and super cold wind too. The place we stopped at a few minutes prior was windy and warm; almost as if the warm inland air was rushing out and the cold air over the ocean was rushing in. Anyways, we easily stayed for 3 or so hours just having a grand time. We tried our hand at light painting, below, and I even spent an unusual amount of time waiting for cars come around a corner behind us to light up the foreground.


Schwarzenegger Under the Stars by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

We drove back to a bridge we wanted photos with but it was super foggy there. We kinda knew it would be, as we passed it on the way in but we were hopeful. We still spent about an hour there light paining on the bridge.

Now. Seeing the Milky Way is something I haven't been able to say I've done. I've photographed it and through the powers of RAW and editing I was able to pronounce it in my photos through the light pollution. I was also able to always see the tail of our galaxy but never our galactic core. I can finally say I've seen the galactic core and it wasn't as noticeable as I thought it would be. I've seen photos where others have edited the Milky Way to the level of noticeability but never believed it. I was always telling myself "Well there's light pollution that's why it's not as clear." I was wrong. It really is that hard to see. Below is my take on the level of visibility the Milky Way has to the eye, versus what the camera sees versus, the minor level of editing required to make the image pop. You'll also see why I waited for cars to round the corner behind us, the cliff is just a dark blob, the headlights gave it some character.



I look forward to sharing the rest of the photos

Bundestag by Nikky, on Flickr

Now, I know I said I wasn't going to focus on photographing the eclipse but that changed.

Here's a composite of 3 photos from 3 different cameras. All shot using a Canon EF 70-300mm zoom.


Sun Camera Test by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

My plan for the photo is to put together a composite photo. Which is something I really don't like doing but I'm making an exception for this event. My idea consists of photographing a landscape shot on my Canon 6D using my 14mm an evening before. That way the sun isn't in the shot when I point the camera in that direction. Then the morning of the eclipse I'll use a my T2i to photograph the eclipse on a tripod at 300mm. I might even rent a 2x extender to make the zoom range 140-600. Additionally, since the T2i holds a smaller sensor but accepts full frame lenses, the zoom lens I use will be multiplied by a factor 1.6x So, I'll have a zoom of 480mm or 960mm with the 2x extender. I definitely plan to exaggerate the size of the eclipse for effect and for any detail.

I shot these photos using a neutral density filter of 18 stops. Allowing me to shoot these photos at ISO100 and 1/320th of a second. I'm probably going to use the T2i for the close up as it seems to produce the most even light across the sun. I'm not sure if this is because it shoots the infrared wavelength but these were taken on the same day.

I'd like to say that I can see details of the sun but I think it's just noise. I stacked 4 photos on top of each other in photoshop and compared for similarities and nothing lined up.

Are you guys making any plans to see the eclipse? Road trips to get into the area of totality?

I am, with my 10 inch telescope! (With a solar filter thingie)

Does this count as photography?


Cemetech Mobile by Michael2_3B

Taken with a Nikon D5500. 55mm lens.

That's the best photography I've seen in a long time!

I really like how it blurs on the bottom and top!

Today, or rather just now, I've been experimenting with multiple-exposure astrophotography. To be exact, I've taken a total of 15 shots of the moon, 5 on good shutter speed, 5 slightly overexposed ones and 5 slightly underexposed ones. My setup is far from ideal, so most of the shots were trash (I don't even have a way to set the camera off without directly pressing its button, causing severe motion blur). I ended up choosing the best one out of every five, and stacked them to reduce noise. Additionally, I took a dark and subtracted it from all three frames, but, honestly, I don't see a difference from that.

Here's the result:

1200mm, ISO 80, 1/200 - 1/250 - 1/320, f/6.3

And the medium exposure shot (straight out of the camera) for comparison:

1200mm, ISO 80, 1/250, f/6.3

I did quite some post processing here. (Aside from stacking three frames and subtracting a dark one) I upped the contrast, adjusted white balance, and fiddled brightness and saturation. Overall, there is a lot of room for improvement with my camera setup, but even taking out that, I am not quite satisfied with the post processing. My theory is that atmospheric disortion (which is probably extra severe right now - it was a hot day and now it is a cold night) slightly changed every frame and it resulted in a simulated "motion blur" when overlaying the pictures. I may also have messed up positioning the frames over each other. As I said, there was significant motion between and during the frames, and I did the positioning by hand. The stacking did reduce noise, but the resulting image seems much less crisp than the individual frames. Does anyone have any tips on that? Did I do something wrong? And is there a way to automate the positioning?

Stacking is really good practice and something I need to get familiar with as time goes on. From what I've read on the process, a dark frame is good for longer exposures and frames. Such as when you're shooting DSOs and reaching exposure times of several minutes across several frames; I've seen some stacked photos that were taken over several nights. Except when shooting the (full) moon the shutter is almost never slower than 1/125th.



Using software to stack your photos for focus is also a thing. The software somehow uses the good frames to remove the atmospheric distortion. Turning a blurry shot of Jupiter or Saturn into a pretty sharp photo. I think it's a pretty specific program and not related to exposure stacking but I could be wrong. Exposure stacking space shots is something I've never done and something I want to learn.

When I stacked photos of the Sun - to see if I captured noise or detail of the Suns surface - this is how I did it:

Set the opacity of the top later to something like 40%, so that the bottom layer is still strongly visible. Align the top/semi-transparent layer as closely as you can while you're zoomed out. Then once you've got it as good as you can get it zoom in to a defining point and use the keyboard arrow keys to nudge it around a pixel at a time (at least for photoshop).

After I did that I realized the detail inside my Sun was just noise



Regardless of camera, almost every modern camera in the past 5 or more years have included a self timer. It's mostly so you can set it and run into a group shot. But it's also really handy at removing the vibrations from the shutter press. 2 seconds should be long enough.

If you have a DSLR, see if you have different shutter modes. If you do, look for Quiet Shutter. It'll raise the mirror then cycle the shutter. It's quieter because the mirror moves slower, and because of that there's less vibration as well. Or, you can just shoot with Live View enabled.

What camera are you shooting with?

Ah, that makes sense. I'll skip this next time, then, although it's not particularly hard to do or anything.


I will have a look and try to find such software - this would certainly be cool.


That's about how I did it. I did not notice any added noise, though - see the comparison picture I posted. If you zoom in, it is pretty clear that the noise was reduced and not added. It may be a side effect of the blurring, though.


Okay, that's something I totally haven't thought of. Bonus points for creativity. Yes, of course I have this option, but I never realized I could use it that way. Thanks for the tip, that's definitely on my list next time!


It is a Sony Cyber-shot DSC HX400V bridge camera, not a DSLR.

That's some excellent space photography Nik with some pretty limited equipment: kudos!

Bringing Mini Me to a pool tomorrow, felt that I needed something to make him more appropriate to the setting. So, a friend generously created and printed a snorkel for him.



II Know this is "photography" but here's a little background DIY on how this came about. A couple weekends ago my group of friends got an invite to a testing facility. They want to test a bot they're making for the heck of it but I... I wanted to test Mini Me. Since we'll be placing our models in water, I thought it was fitting to get him a snorkel; scuba tanks would have been too hard on the time line we had.

So, I set out to take measurements. The thing is, I couldn't find my calipers so I did the next best thing. Took a photo of him, measured a particular distance on a ruler and dove into Photoshop. I knew it had analysis tools and I was familiar with them so I didn't worry too much.




Here we have the initial measurements in those thick green lines. I should have been more thorough by including the ruler IN the photo but it turned out pretty well in the end. Photoshop only goes to 6 digits so that's what I included. I didn't round anything beyond that just in case my friend needed exact measurements; I figured it was safer to let him round things.



These measurements are slightly different from the first set not because of a measuring inaccuracy (but this time I did include a ruler in the shot) but because I selected different points. Here, the width of his head is ear to ear instead of tempt to temple. And the length of the head is from the forehead to the back of the top part of the head. You'll notice a little bit of hair color beyond the circle but that's just above level with the ears. And I we wanted the 3d printed band of the snorkel to stay on his face, it would have to rest on something. Also, if I ever make hats for him in the future, they won't ever need to go that low. So, it didn't make tons of sense to include that little bit. (But I did include it in the first measurement.)

So, I think now I need to buy a 3D printer and print him stuff. Like Santa hats and pumpkin heads. Maybe I'll even try and make him the scuba tanks like he truly deserves so that he'll be ready for the next underwater adventure.

Took a trip this weekend and focused more on my infrared photography. I'm really happy with the results.


Barge by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

I converted the following photos to black and white, while they are a bit on the contrasty side I am really pleased with them. My previous B&W infrareds have completely lacked any contrast, the photo of the barge above would be in B&W too but it didn't have that awesome contrast. I've always known that shooting in mid-day or away from the sun was ideal for IR, as the sun will create bright foliage and, when shooting into the sun, create a gray sky. Which is not ideal as you want a black sky. So I put that knowledge to use here and learned more about shooting in IR.


Park by Alex Glanville, on Flickr


Brunch by Alex Glanville, on Flickr


Under the Trees by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

Some images I got off the coast of Lake Erie, not too far from where I live.