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Hey Everyone,

Well currently I have no camera (except 35mm film) as I have sent my D90 to a new owner and am waiting patiently for my D800E to arrive, so got nothing better to do...well maybe I should be studying for my engineering exams but anyways thought I should post some of my recent images. I also recently bought a Voigtlander Avus large format camera which will be fun.

Bombo quarry sunrise:


I've been taking a lot of star trails recently:


New favourite location is a small town west of Kiama called Jamberoo which has heaps of old farm sheds:


This is one of the last images taken on my D90 and I used an IR filter:


Keen to know what you think and if you have any tips.

Cheers

Chris

Absolutely love 1 & 2. The sunrise, with just a wisp is cloud, is wonderfully captured.

Looking forward to seeing some of your images with the D800, when it arrives!

Ozi.

Can I ask how long the exposure for the IR image was? Last time I tried to expose on non-converted D300 (very similar/same sensor) it was a very long exposure with little payoff.

nice snaps.

ozimax wrote:Absolutely love 1 & 2. The sunrise, with just a wisp is cloud, is wonderfully captured.
Looking forward to seeing some of your images with the D800, when it arrives!
Ozi.

Thanks Ozi!

aim54x wrote:Can I ask how long the exposure for the IR image was? Last time I tried to expose on non-converted D300 (very similar/same sensor) it was a very long exposure with little payoff.

Yeah no problem:

Exposure: 15 seconds
Aperture: f/5.0
Focal Length: 11 mm
ISO Speed: 250

The exposures are longer but I paid around $20 for the filter so its not too bad.

biggerry wrote:nice snaps.

Thanks biggerry!

There all good; I think I prefer #1 best. I don't think you need as much sky for that one though. I think it improves it to crop down as far as haflway into the cloud.

Could I confirm that the first 3 are done on film? If so, pretty impressive metering to get it spot on. Did you bracket?

Murray Foote wrote:There all good; I think I prefer #1 best. I don't think you need as much sky for that one though. I think it improves it to crop down as far as haflway into the cloud.

Thanks Murray, Yeah I agree that its not needed but I kinda like the free space and for colour landscapes I don't really like squarish images.

surenj wrote:Could I confirm that the first 3 are done on film? If so, pretty impressive metering to get it spot on. Did you bracket?

No they were shot on my D90. Probably could have got the shot with film just would have used my sekonic light meter and metered for the rocks, grads to balance the sky and maybe bracket to be safe but I never usually bracket my images with film. The middle two would be very hard as the star trail one would have so much noise especially on film with such a long exposure. I took around 100 images for over an hour and stacked them in photoshop and then blended one for the foreground (light painting). The sunset one was three images combined in photoshop (not using hdr software) to get an even exposure right through the image (foreground, water and sky). With Velvia 50 film (what I'm using) it would be hard to push the dynamic range as much and the exposure would have to be spot on.

dervish16 wrote:The middle two would be very hard as the star trail one would have so much noise especially on film with such a long exposure.

Not with Velvia. In 1987 when I was photographing lighthouses, I took a four hour exposure by moonlight using Fuji 50 (on 5x4) showing long star trails with no discernible noise.

Murray Foote wrote:Not with Velvia. In 1987 when I was photographing lighthouses, I took a four hour exposure by moonlight using Fuji 50 (on 5x4) showing long star trails with no discernible noise.

It can be done but 5x4 film is much larger then 35mm so the noise is much easier to hide. Even with digital I don't like doing exposures longer then 5 minutes as the noise is too high. Also with moonlight you won't have any pure black so the noise is more hidden but with a new moon and 4 hour exposures the blacks will look pretty bad haha. But it can definitely be done.

dervish16 wrote:

Murray Foote wrote:Not with Velvia. In 1987 when I was photographing lighthouses, I took a four hour exposure by moonlight using Fuji 50 (on 5x4) showing long star trails with no discernible noise.

It can be done but 5x4 film is much larger then 35mm so the noise is much easier to hide. Even with digital I don't like doing exposures longer then 5 minutes as the noise is too high. Also with moonlight you won't have any pure black so the noise is more hidden but with a new moon and 4 hour exposures the blacks will look pretty bad haha. But it can definitely be done.

I pulled out a 16x20 Cibachrome print of that image. The surface has unfortunately deteriorated but there appears to be little or no grain. I think that would largely apply to 35mm. Mind you, unless purely because you have the equipment, I can't see much point in shooting 35mm film these days when second hand medium format is quite cheap. Not that I've shot any film since I got a D3. I don't see why you should not have pure black with moonlight - it's just reflected daylight and is hardly likely to fog the film. If that's what you get, correcting is easy enough in post-processing.

I haven't tried ultra long exposures with digital so far. The longest I have in Lightroom is two minutes.

Murray Foote wrote:I pulled out a 16x20 Cibachrome print of that image. The surface has unfortunately deteriorated but there appears to be little or no grain. I think that would largely apply to 35mm. Mind you, unless purely because you have the equipment, I can't see much point in shooting 35mm film these days when second hand medium format is quite cheap. Not that I've shot any film since I got a D3. I don't see why you should not have pure black with moonlight - it's just reflected daylight and is hardly likely to fog the film. If that's what you get, correcting is easy enough in post-processing.

I haven't tried ultra long exposures with digital so far. The longest I have in Lightroom is two minutes.

Yeah 35mm is an amateurs film but since I am only 20 years old and I didn't grow up using film I shoot film just because I like the complete manual feel of it especially with cameras like my zorki 4 which has no batteries in it and developing the film by myself. There is something special about it that digital doesn't have but for all the images I want to display I would prefer to just use the D800E as it's medium format quality and much easier to use.

Nah even with a bit of moonlight the sky will become more blueish and the starts don't pop as much. I never use film to shoot start trails and with digital I do 30 second exposures and combine them all. The image above was actually shot with the full moon behind me. It's possible to still get a decent image as I am stacking images and can control the strength of light but my friend who did a long exposure couldn't get the shot as there was just too much light and the image looked like daylight.

Shooting monochrome film and processing it yourself is also I think the cheapest route to reasonable photographic quality.

Moonlight is daylight, it just uses a huge reflector out in space. After all, the exposure for the moon is the same as full daylight on Earth. The only reason it looks different is that our eyes use our rods rather than our cones in very low light. So a moonlight scene that looks like daylight is authentic; if you want most people to think it's moonlight just use a pronounced blue cast. Too much light should not be a problem as long as you have a correct exposure; you can change the image later according to what you want.

The one advantage film does have over digital is continuous star trails. They look quite different. I must try a long exposure some time though I'm preoccupied with other things at the moment. I would guess I could get 4 hours or two with in-camera long exposure noise reduction. Within reason, noise out of the camera is not a problem, it's just another processing challenge.

You're doing well with your images, though. Keep on experimenting.