Mount Victoria

[adavis]

Well, despite my complaining about the weather being less than optimal for nightscape shots, read cloudy :-), it fined up on Sunday night and I headed out at 8:30pm into the mountains.

New spot, at Mount Victoria, and armed with my head filled with things to try, off I set.

Unfortunately, this is probably the best shot that I got, as I was far too optimistic in my pano setup.
For those interested, I shot a 270 degree approx pano, in portrait, 15 x 50% overlapped frames wide, and 4 high. manual focus and correct, Bulb, f3.5 (widest my lens does) etc etc, but for some reason my sleepy mind said 'shoot at ISO 6400, it'll be fine'. Then in the middle of shooting I kept reminding myself, shoot it again at ISO 3200, but for some reason I just didnt.

So, yet again, I spent a REALLY long night and pretty much only took one pano and put all my eggs in the one basket.

The issue was that the milky way was directly overhead and Im left with a pano that wont stitch :sadeyes:

Anywho, here is the best of a bad bunch.
it is 6 shots in landscape, stitched vertically.

as per usual,
Canon 7D
Canon 18mm-200mm Zoom
18mm
f3.5
ISO 6400
25 seconds

[jamiep]

Nice shot

Give Hugin Panorama Phot Stitcher a go - it'll allow you to put in some manual alignment points (key stars between shots will do the trick) and put together your pano - as long as there is enough overlap....

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

[adavis]

Yup, it is in my box of tricks, no dice unfortunately.

The issue is that my top row pano was tilted up so high to get the milky way overhead that it just cant cope with the twisting of the frames.

I will give it another go tonight now that i have had more sleep, however. :lol:

[gregbradley]

With panoramas (I do them a lot) you often need to add in some manual stitching points (usually called control points in PTGui Pro). So not stitching is usual. Shoot in portrait mode and try to get some landscape in each shot. Sky only usually fails in stitching and you have to manually click on the same star in adjoining images.

You can also take it further and get a panorama head like Nodal Ninja 4. Then the images are corrected for parallax error if you set it up properly.

When shooting at 14mm though, parallax errors are pretty minor.

ISO6400 is pushing your 7D way hard. You are losing a lot of dynamic range and the resulting image is overstretched. Ideal would be closer to ISO1200/F4 and 2.5 minutes on a Polarie. But then its hard to move the camera to the right angles needed for a panorama. When does it ever end?

Greg.

[ourkind]

I like the composition and this time you've got plenty of foreground but the sky is too sepia, have you made any adjustments to the sky other than the stitching? I'd try cooling it down.

[iceman]

Great start again Andrew - you're improving and learning every time out!

[adavis]

Hi Greg, thanks for the all the comments, appreciated!
At the moment, I'm just using a Manfrotto 3-way head, and older version of this http://www.manfrotto.com/3d-super-pro-head, but that pano head does look tempting.

The ISO6400 was definitely just a stupid mistake, I really dont know what I was thinking, I usually shoot these at 3200, which I know is also a bit high, but I have been trying to compensate for the f3.5 lens.

I have a Tokina 11-16 f2.8 coming today, so my next outing will be a whole new learning experience ;-)

[adavis]

Hi Carlos, thanks for the comments.
yeah I have boosted the shot a lot in Lightroom, but I still dont particularly know where the sepia tinge is coming from, it was there in the RAW files.

I will have to do some more investigation.

[adavis]

Thanks Mike, appreciate it!

[matt34]

Hi Andrew

I'm pretty sure the red/sepia is coming from the white balance. As Carlos suggest try cooling the WB eg make it bluer. In Lightroom you may also need to adjust the red/green WB slider as well. I normally watch the histogram while adjusting the sliders & try and get the colour fairly neutral. Hope that helps a little.

[adavis]

Hi Matt, thanks for that, I will give it a go.

cheers