Eric And The Arch By Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Sorry For The Title Eric, I Couldn't Help Myself. Once

The Two Legged Hoodoo by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook Valley of Dreams, New Mexico. Nikon D810A camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens, at f 2.8, 14 mm, 25 sec., and ISO 6400. There is lighting with Low Level Lighting. For a tutorial please look here: www.lowlevellighting.org For more images like this please take a look at my website here . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. Cheers, Wayne

Goblin Valley at Night on Flickr.

Goblin Valley State Park, Utah, at Night with the Milky Way above. Walking through Goblin Valley at night is like walking through an alien land, erie and otherworldly. It's definately worth a visit! Canon 6D camera, Sigma 15mm fisheye lens, f 2.8, 30 sec exposure, ISO 6400. Hope you enjoy! The rock formations have been likened to Goblins. If you let your imagination run wild, you can imagine that the rising sun turned the Goblins into stone in some ancient time, and the passing eons have eroded them into these shapes. The place certainly has a lot of atmosphere especially at night

Hi Wayne, I just wanna pop by and say 'thank you'. It's very kind of you to share your tips and experience with us in taking good landscape astro photos. I wish you all the very best in your journey. Asteria.

Thanks for taking the time to look and write. It’s much appreciated. Cheers, Wayne

Morning Twilight at the Trona Pinnacles by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This one is a bit different. I overstayed my welcome, trying to get as many photos around the Pinnacles as possible before the sun rose, but despite my best efforts, the sun rose anyway. I was still shooting when the morning twilight started. As I took this photo the sun's glow was starting to be seen on the horizon, and with light pollution created a yellow glow. There were clouds near the horizon which were illuminated also. The sky was becoming noticeably lighter, but you could still see the Milky Way surprisingly well. There are 2 static lights helping to light the spires, one downhill to my right, and one downhill from my feet. There is also a fair amount of ambient light present from the twilight hour. It was a kind of "golden hour" before sunrise. Canon 1Dx Camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens at 20 mm, f 2.8, 30 sec, and ISO 6400. Hope you enjoy!

16 Room Ruin by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Anasazi Part 6: This is a selfie taken outside of the Ancient Puebloan Ruin called The 16 Room Riun, near the San Juan River and Bluff, Utah. This is a single exposure. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Your time, faves, and comments are much appreciated! Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

Set the Table for One... by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: A quiet night in the Bisti Badlands of New Mexico. There are many of these "Table Top" Hoodoos scattered around the area. These develop when the base , a softer rock, erodes faster than the top, making for a wide variety of shapes. These table tops are one of my favorites. When the flat tops are really long or wide, they have been given the name of "winged hoodoos", and some are quite long and wing-like. Here I was playing around with the lights. Canon 6D camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens at 14 mm, f 2.8, 30 sec., and ISO 6400. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

The Elephant Walks at Night by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Thank You Flickr!!! This is my photo from earlier this year that was included in the recently announced Top 25 Photos on Flickr Award for the year 2017. blog.flickr.net/en/2017/12/07/top-25-photos-on-flickr-in-... So what does this mean? I do not delude myself into thinking that this is one of the best 25 photos on Flickr, It is not. I see many photos that I consider much better than my own. I am humbled by many of the high quality photos I see on Flickr, and those are what drive me to try and improve. This award, to the best of my knowledge, is based on how many views, likes, and comments a photo receives. What this award means is that many, many people on Flickr have been very, very kind to me, This is award is a reflection of the wonderful Flickr Community. It means that many of you have taken the time to look at my photos and comment and maybe "like" them. This award is simply a reflection of how kind people have been to me, much more than anything I have done myself. So I get it that you all have made this possible. So this is my sincere THANK YOU to all the wonderful Flickr people that made this happen. This is your award, much more than mine. Cheers, and Happy Shooting to all in 2018! Wayne Pinkston

Questions and Answers:

What color is the night sky?

Question: (more like a comment) Great composition and exposure, but the Milky Way is not blue, the color balance is not correct. 

http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/color.of.the.night.sky/

Answer: Thanks for looking, and thanks for the comment. Much appreciated. 

What color is the night sky? Excellent article you mentioned:

www.clarkvision.com/articles/color.of.the.night.sky/

I have been thinking about writing about this for a while, so thanks for stimulating me. Please bear with me for a few minutes.I have had this conversation multiple times, actually being on both sides of the argument. It took me a long time to come to a conclusion on how I wanted to present the night sky. 

I actually agree with you entirely, the darkest night sky is a warmer color physically, but...

There is a difference between:

1) What color the night sky really is optically (we cannot see the real colors because our night vision is mostly B&W). 

2) What we perceive the night sky color to be (our eyes are poor receptors at night), and what our eyes actually perceive is not what we may remember or what the colors really are. By the way, different people have somewhat differing ability to see color at night.

3) and what we remember the color of the night sky to be. 

For events that we see repeatedly, like looking at the night sky (or going to the beach, etc.), it has been shown that we do not remember every detail in every instance of looking at the night sky. We may remember the meteor we saw that night, but our memory fills in the background details, like the color of the night sky, the smell of night air or desert air, the feel of chill on your skin, etc., with a combined memory of conglomeration of all the night skies we have seen. When you replay the memory in your mind you remember the unique details, and the background is filled in from averaged memories. 

So... if you think about it, most people see most night skies in light polluted places or with a moon in the sky, all of which makes the sky lighter and bluer. The moon is above us more often than not, and lightens the sky, and that is what we mostly remember, a bluish sky.When I started out I thought the night sky was black. 

When I got out there in the really dark places, it was not black. I look at photos with black skies and that is not what I see out there. Never. The sky also never looks brown to me, unless there is smoke on the horizon. It never looks brown. As I stand out there for hours and hours, it looks to me to be a deep blue tending towards back. It mostly looks "dark" in away that is hard to explain.

I have processed them every way you can think of, including like in the article you quoted. It's actually a lot easier that way. When you make the Milky Way warmer and yellow brown (forget about airglow for now), the background sky, especially near the horizon frequently turns brownish. It has never looked that way to me in person, in weeks and weeks of being out at night. It just looks unnatural to me. 

So what do you do? Well, the answer in photo circles seems to be you do just about anything you want.

Once I got in a discussion with a very famous and respected photographer about the color of the sky. At that time I was arguing the point from the view you take. I finally asked what color is the night sky?His answer was "any color I want it to be". It bothered me at first, but less over time. 

So, do you want to make a photo that is true to physics, but is not what anyone can ever see (and at times may be ugly), or make an idealized view of the sky, or simply try to make a work of art, or something people can identify with?

It is a question each person has to answer for themselves, and the answer will be different each time. 

For me, I decided, for now, to try to make a work of art that people can identify with. Next year my choice may be different.

Cheers, and thanks for stimulating me to finally write this down!

Wayne Pinkston

Questions and Answers

How to manage noise in night photography

Question: I've looked as many of your nightscape photos as I could and it seems that all of them are so noise free. Like you, I use a Canon 6D or the  but I always seem to get that magenta colored noise in the foreground when I shoot at 25-30 seconds. That's why I do composites for most of my nightscapes. I see that you are using a Nikon 14-24 mm lens. Is that your secret weapon? Or do you some other secret?

Answer: I use the Canon 6D or the Nikon 810A cameras. The magenta color comes from lightening the underexposed dark areas.It is a little worse on the Canon as compared to the Nikon, but can occur with any camera. There is no secret weapon unless it is the cameras themselves. Both do incredibly well at hight ISO. The key is to pay attention to detail at every strep of the process. Remember that anything you do early in the processing can snowball and make noise worse at each subsequent step in the processing. Remember also that contrast and sharpening can make noise worse so you want to minimize or simply eliminate any sharpening and contrast increase EARLY in the processing. Also remember that the sky and foreground have to be treated separately. The sky is a very high contrast subject (light stars and dark sky), and the foreground is an extremely flat or low contrast subject. Also remember that the appearance of sharpness is created by 2 things, resolution and contrast. Since the sky is hight contrast you do not need to do much sharpening. You will only increase the appearance of noise there. The foreground in low contrast and may need sharpening. 

This is what I do (1) Image acquisition - try to shoot to the right (of the histogram). There is a lot more info in the pixels to the right side of the histogram, and less on the far left dark side. A lot of respected Astrophotographers are going to ISO 12,800. The D6 or 810A can handle this ISO. When you push the histogram to the right then you are moving the dark pixels more to towards the middle of the histogram, and there is a lot more info in the pixels. The thought is that the same photo taken at ISO 12,800 has more info in the pixels that the same photo taken at 6400, or 3200. You can deal with the noise in Lightroom of Adobe RAW. 

(2) Open the image in Lightroom or Adobe RAW. Always acquire RAW images when shooting. I use the temp and tint sliders to make the darkest part of the sky as neutral as possible (grey). If I cannot make it neutral then I err to the slightly blue side. Concentrate on the upper and darkest sky, not near the horizon. Do not make the sky too blue at this early step. Use the lens profile correction function. The vignetting will pop up at 100%. Reduce it to about 50-60% or so. Too much vignetting removal will bring out that magenta color in the lower corners. DO NOT use Clarity at this time. DO NOT do any real sharpening at this level. Leave the shahrpening at the default of 25%, and increase the mask to 75%. DO NOT do any contrast adjustments at this level. If you do it will only get worse later. I use a Luminance Noise factor of about 50 for the 6D, and detail of 50%. There is not a lot of Color Noise in the 6D files, and I use a Color Noise Factor of 17-20, and set the Smoothness to 100%. Use the Shadow Slider to lighten up the dark areas to your personal taste. Again, DO NOT use the Clarity Slider.  The image will look very flat. Click Edit or Export to Photoshop or click the "Open Image" in Adobe RAW. 

(3) Select or Mask the Sky or Foreground to separate them in Photoshop, by whatever means you want. You need to treat them differently. I place the sky and foreground in separate layers and process then separately. For the Foreground/Ground Selection: I May use the Shadows/Highlights Function the lighten up the dark areas using a setting of 3 to 5 (very low). Then increase the contrast a Little, by using the Curves function and place a Minimal"S" shaped curve on the foreground.  Alternatively you could open the Levels function and move the shadows slider to the right.  I may use the Topaz Denoise plugin to further decrease noise in the foreground. It may make the foreground soft. I then do some limited sharpening. Remember, sharpening increases the appearance of the noise, so I go about it differently, and use the Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpening to INCREASE LOCAL CONTRAST. This is a lot like the Clarity function. Do this only after you have done any color correction on the foreground, and you are happy with the foreground otherwise. It is the opposite of normal sharpening. Use use an amount of 10-20 and a radius of 40-60. I usually use 15 and 60. It increases local contrast and the Perception of sharpness without increasing the perception of noise. If there is magenta in the corners I select that area and go to Hue/Saturation function, choose Magenta, and decrease saturation. Alternatively you can select the magenta area and go to the Color Balance function and add green, or a third way to get rid of the magenta is to paint or brush over it with green. You will not need to do that much usually. 

(4) For the sky, I first use the Levels Command and take the Shadows slider and move it to the right, making the darks darker. This does not do much to the lighter shades. I AVOID the Curves function as much as possible. You do not really need it, and adjusting “Curves” changes the colors, making them much more saturated, and they get out of hand very quickly. You can adjust Contrast with the Levels Command and the Contrast Command, and it is MUCH easier to keep the colors and noise under control. Curves can also make the noise look worse, I may increase the vibrance about 10 or so. It helps to darken the sky without increasing the Contrast so much. I then go to the Color Balance Command, and increase Blue slightly. It does not take much. I then go back to the Levels or Contrast Command and adjust the Milky Way and Sky to the brightness or darkness I desire. I may use a little Dodging or Burning. I Do Not sharpen the sky. I prefer the sky to look a little softer rather than crunchy or crispy. Remember the sky is already a high contrast subject, so you do not really need to sharpen it to have the perception of sharpness. Remember,  perceived sharpness is a function of contrast and resolution, you already have one component of sharpness (hight contrast) in abundance. 

So managing noise requires you to be diligent throughout the process, from acquisition to the end of processing. The most important thing is to not make noise worse in the processing.

Cheers, Wayne

Reflections at White Pocket by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Faceb ook White Pocket, Az. This is a highly eroded and sculpted landscape in Northern Arizona. There are dramatic bands of different colored rock creating layers and swirls within the areas of erosion. The primary colors are variations of red, yellow, and white. The surface is rippled in many areas, and I tried using Low Level Lighting to accent the textured surface. Accenting the surface actually took away from the bands of color, and I finally decided that the colors were more important, and captured the foreground with long exposures of approximately 5 minutes, and the sky with 20 second exposures. This creates a flatter image, but captures the colors well. The 2 were blended in PS. For more images like this please take a look at Wayne Pinkston Photography . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. It's a pleasure to post here.