POTW 488: 21/9/19 - 27/9/19

Delighted to get a POTW.

As some of you may have noticed this isn't taken in Ireland, but is from the Karangahake Gorge, about 2 hours drive from Auckland, NZ.

For details about the shot itself, taken with a Canon 6D + Samyang 24mm F1.4 lens. It's a manual lens so don't have exif for appeture, but I'll hazard a guess it's f2.0. Camera was set to iso 6400 and 30 sec exposure.

Compositionally it's pretty simple, allign the milky way with the falls. There just unfortunately wasn't enough space at the site so get it perfectly in alignment but I was happy enough. I had actually hoped to get a pre dusk sunset picture of the falls, and then later do a stitch with the milky way but a lack go patience meant I moved my tripod. This would have given the falls a much brighter tone but would have been more surrealistic imo.
For planning compositions like this I use apps such as stelarium and PhotoPills and visit earlier in the day to know where eveything will be aligned later.

The moon was rising at roughly 9pm but astronomical night (when sun goes 18 degrees below horizon and when the less bright stars become visible) occurred around 7.20pm so I only had about 90 mins to work with, but it was more than enough time to get a number of shots in.

Post processing was a two stage process. Bump the darks up in the foreground and, then apply standard milky way processing settings to the sky. https://www.lonelyspeck.com/astrophotography-101/ gives a better guide than I ever could on how to process the milky way but it's straight forward once you get the hang of it.

Hope that's of some use to someone, and if you want to know anything else let me know.

CelticRambler wrote: »

Thanks for the detail. So that's just a regular Canon and a regular lens - no hacking the sensor for extra infra-red?

Was there ambient lighting at the site (looks like a bit of sodium-like yellow in the trees at the top)?

Yup it's a bog standard canon and manual Samyang lens, no messing around or hacking anything. I don't have the budget for multiple cameras to have an IR camera as much as I'd maybe like to get one.

I believe the orange lighting at the top of the falls is a very fortunate coincidence, where a single passing lorry shone its lights onto some rocks or ferns at the top of the falls.

Ambient lighting, good spot and something I forgot to mention. It's pretty much a dark sky site in the gorge, so there's a small amount of light added to the foreground using a small pocket torch. I had to avoid excessive lighting using the torch because it creates a very harsh reflection on the water. But maybe 5 seconds of light painting in total on the foreground was enough to make the picture useable.