2 nights under the darkest skies I've seen

Wow, it's been awhile since I've visited this forum, over a year, and it seems much has changed since I was here last. Over the last year I've spent many nights honing in on my Nightscape abilities and pushing my technical ability to the max. I'm happy at where I am now, though it took a lot of practice and countless hours scouring the internet for information regarding shooting Landscapes at night. I have fellow member Baz to thank for most of what I know. I hope he still frequents this forum, he has a staggering wealth of information and is a generally great guy. He's inspired me from the beginning and his images were some of the first astro shots I ever saw.

Anyway, last week my wife and I took a trip down to Arches National Park in Utah. The night skies there are immensly dark. It's hard to articulate the beauty of it all without personally experiencing it. None the less I tried my best to capture the scene of the night with a mixture of light painting, patience and high ISO (god bless the 6D for having such a phobia of noise!). I shoot all my nightscapes single image without blending or stacking, some post is done in lightroom of course, but for the most part I try to be fairly purist with my captures..just my own style. Perhaps one day I'll walk down the road of photoshop wizardry, but for now, one image is all I need.

Tent life. Our free camping spot that was conveniently located about 10 minutes out side of the Arches National park gates. Why there were only about 3 other tents at this perfect spot remains a mystery to me.

Amazing pics, specially the second one.

Fantastic shots and trip. I hope I can do something similar one day.
Any info the settings and lens you used?

Cheers. Exif is 41 Seconds - f2.8 - ISO 3600 for all. I used my 6D with Samyang 14.

Thanks!
It seems like a long exposure. Didn't you get startrails?
Why not use a faster shutter speed and use higher ISO? Is it a choice? Did you get better results that way?

At 14mm on a Full Frame star trails don't really become evident till around the 1 minute mark, so 41 seconds is fine. Ramping up the ISO will lead to more noise in the image, so my first priority is always to keep the ISO as low as I possibly can. I also wanted a fairly long exposure to give me enough time to light paint the rock.

Wow. Great stuff.

AbPho wrote in post #17710038
Wow. Great stuff.

Agreed!

Good Grief! In the fourth pic I see you've found The Guardian of Forever.

Welcome back to POTN!
Awesome shots, I truly like #2.

Thanks everyone for the kind words!

~ Damien

Indeed!

neimad19 wrote in post #17710000
At 14mm on a Full Frame star trails don't really become evident till around the 1 minute mark, so 41 seconds is fine. Ramping up the ISO will lead to more noise in the image, so my first priority is always to keep the ISO as low as I possibly can. I also wanted a fairly long exposure to give me enough time to light paint the rock.

that's a strangely interesting comment, I start seeing star trails after 35 sec with the Samyang 14mm and the FF cam
500 / 14 = 35.7 sec
usually restrict exp to 30 sec to be safe
maybe I need to experiment more ?


Dave

The trailing will definitely start at around 35 seconds but, for me, it's hard to really notice them on an uncropped image until about the 60 second mark. After 1 minute exposures, the stars start to become more than just elongated dots, they become obvious little trails. Anything under 1 minute is passable in my books, anything over 1 minute is star trail territory.

These are great. My favorite is #2, but the light source seems obvious in a distracting way, and could be alleviated in post. That's my only nit. Good job.