The Beauty Of The Night Sky

In my adolscent days, I spent the nights out partying with my friends, these days I silently spend them photographing the night sky. Have not been out at nights for almost one year now, so it got time to travel to my favorite destination in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Lots of people around at this time of the year, even more after loosening the coronavirus restrictions. But when the night falls in, everything calms down. Silence and solitude kicks in – what I like most. Enjoy!

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52 x 13 sec. for the stars, 1 x 200 sec. for the foreground, stacked with PixInsight, merged with Gimp, adjustments with Viveza and Lightroom, 5 D3 @ 35mm, no Polarie this time…

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Creating My First Photo Book

My long-awaited wish finally came true last week – creating my first photo book, using Saal-Digital (https://www.saal-digital.de/) for printing. I don´t get sponsored by this company, but making the book with their software was an easy one and the quality and service of it is superb. It is much easier than handling Blurb´s BookWright, not to speak of the integrated Blurb module in Lightroom (LR is great, but the book module is not). My first photo book is about my home, the Holledau, the largest continious hop planting area of the world, right here in Lower Bavaria, Germany. So, here is my workflow, using Lightroom and Saal Design Software:

1. Put the images you want for your book in a new folder in LR

2. Calibrate your monitor (if you haven´t done that already…)

3. Edit your the images in LR

4. Download the ICC-profile for the photo paper you want your images to be printed on

5. Install the ICC-profile into LR and use  “soft proof” in LR to adjust the images to the selected paper

6. Export the selected images to a new folder on your desktop

7. Open Saal Design Software, open the folder with your images and let the fun start…

There are heaps of tutorials on youtube, concerning soft proofing in general, and there are also some of Saal Digital itself, getting you ready for doing your first-ever photo book. Enjoy, but be aware, it might get you addicted!

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Re: The Milky Way – By Canon 1100 D(a) & Vixen Polarie

In 2012 I did a post about imaging the Milky Way combining it with a photogenic foreground (https://wp.me/p1aVSr-A8). The images were taken more than five years ago now, using a Vixen Polarie  and a modified Canon 1100 D – which makes it a 1100 D (a). Back then I took a set of images of the same subject, with exposure times up to 5 minutes, hoping that there might be some software out there for stacking star images and combining them with a static foreground image, preferably (but not always) taken with the same camera settings prior to the others. The only difference: turning off the tracker device while shooting the foreground. The shown images in this post are all composites, with a “tracked” background and a “non-tracked” foreground, using PixInsight (stacking), Gimp (merging), Viveza (local adjustments) and Lightroom (general adjustments). Next step will be putting together a mosaic of a set of stacked images of our Milky Way, taken in August 2013, East coast Australia. Enjoy!

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South Tyrol, Italy, left: 5 images stacked with Pixinsight, right: final image with a total of 423 sec. for the stars and 179 sec. for the foreground…

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The Dolomites, Italy, left: 6 images stacked with Pixinsight, right: final image with a total of 1024 sec. for the stars and 25 sec. for the foreground…

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Großglockner Ridge, Austria, left: 14 images stacked with Pixinsight, right: final image with a total of 1318 sec. for the stars and 357 sec. for the foreground…

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The Großglockner, the highest mountain in Austria, left: 23 images stacked with Pixinsight, right: final image with a total of 1191 sec. for the stars and 169 sec. for the foreground…

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Brennkogel and Hochtor, Großglockner High Alpine Road, Austria, left: 10 images stacked with Pixinsight, right: final image with a total of 1625 sec. for the stars and 25 sec. for the foreground…

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