Galaxy Shots!

What's up guys?! How was your weekend? I'm hoping you guys accomplished more than I did! I didn't do much at all other than read; thanks a lot Mr. Parker ;(. But anyways, so you guys remember my last post about star trails? Well, I've been researching even more astrophotography and have gotten really into galaxy photos! These photos are sooo sick, and I want to shoot some of these SO BAD. So far quite a few websites have aided in finding information necessary to shoot these photos. In this 'tutorial' I'll teach you how to shoot these incredible photos and show you the sites I used to find the information needed to take these. Just so you know, I have NOT taken any of these photos (yet), so I'm yet again basing this info off of other peoples' experiences, so if your photos go wrong, don't blame me...

A Milky Way Galaxy shot taken by UHD Wallpapers

Finding the right spot is key here. Similar to star trails, light pollution can't be a part of the photo, or else it won't turn out the way you want it to. The moon can't be out or else it'll be a source of light pollution. So after finding the right nights, you have to find the right spot. For this segment, I use the Dark Site Finder, which is a website showing how much light pollution occurs throughout the area in which you want to shoot in. This is actually very helpful and a good tool for astrophotography. Light pollution affects the photos quality greatly, so you want to make sure there's very little of it.

The next steps to taking these photos are to find the right settings and equipment. Finding a DSLR is crucial to take these photos, so all of you white girls trying to be artsy can't just use your iPhone. On that DSLR you need a lens as well, which preferably should be as wide-angle as possible. I've read that a great lens for galaxy photos is the Rokinon 14 mm Ultra Wide-Angle. This seems like a great lens, and I might consider investing in it. Another thing necessary is a tripod. The camera obviously needs to be stable to take a clear photo. Flashlights and other things similar to it would help as well, since you will be shooting in the middle of the night. To focus your camera, use the flashlight as a focal point a ways away. Now here are the settings (and these may vary for your lens, camera, lighting, etc.): ISO should be quite high (around 1600), but from what I've read, 6400 is too grainy. The f/stop should be around 1.4 with a fast lens, but with a slower lens go around f/2.8 (but you may need to raise the ISO with a slower lens as well). Now there's one other thing that I've learned about in galaxy photos: the 500 rule. This rule tells you how long your exposure should be. What you do is divide your focal length of the lens by 500-- this gets you to your optimal shutter speed. So the number you get is the highest amount of seconds your exposure should be. One last thing on settings: USE RAW, not JPEG. Astrophotography is just much better with RAW because of the white balance and other things similar to that. 

So, did that help? That has helped me a ton, and I can't wait to actually try it out this weekend! Tell me how your guys' photos turn out or send me a photo! Thanks for reading, hope to talk to you soon!

Another shot showing how amazing these photos are
Creds to Pix Good

Star Trails

Stars are just an incredible thing to witness. Just the majestic ambiance of these massive balls of fire are incredible. I've always been intrigued by these celestial objects and I've always wanted to capture the incredible essence that these things give off. So one of the only ways to do this is to shoot photos of them. There are many ways to shoot stars, from galaxy pictures to star trails. In this post, I'm going to provide some information on how to create star trails, which are as cool as they sound. Then on the next post, I'll tell you how to shoot some galaxy pictures. I've always had a liking for the galaxy and stars and stuff, and since I want to be an astrophysicist I guess that makes sense. It's so incredible on how diverse star formations can be. With star trails, you'll never look at the stars in the same way.

This is just awe-inspiring...
Creds to 4 Image Gallery

Okay so I have to confess before I start giving tips: I HAVE NOT yet done star trails, so this is mainly based off of other people's accounts of trying it. I'm hoping these people are trust-worthy, because I'm going to go off of their settings as well. So we'll try this together! Later on (once I take some photos) I'll share them with you guys! But for now I'll have to just give you the settings so you can take some pictures as well! 

Finding the right day (well, night actually):

So for this kind of shoot the night has to be absolutely perfect. The moon can't be seen at all, and if it is, then good luck getting a decent exposure. Also, any type of cloud cover will not be satisfactory. If any clouds are in the sky, then the pictures won't turn out well at all because the clouds will blur the photos and white them out. It also needs to be cold, or else the lens will have condensation on it after a while, making the shots blurry. One of the last things you need to do while getting set up is point your camera at the North Star. Since the Earth is spinning around the North Star, once you take the exposures the other stars will have seemed to be circling the N.S.. This is how star trails are created. So to sum it up: no moon, no clouds, no light pollution, must be cold, and you have to point the camera towards the North Star. To find when and what time to shoot these photos, I recommend Photographer's Empheris, an incredible app that's free for download that tells you when it's a good time to shoot these photos. 

The Settings:

So there are quite a few steps to getting the right photo here. First of all, you need to make sure you have all of the proper equipment. Obviously you need a tripod, similar to all long exposures. Another good thing to have is a leveler. This is helpful for obvious reasons. Acquiring the largest wide-angle lens would also help, just to get as much of the scenery in as you can. Now here are the actual settings that I got from Tony Northrup on Youtube. So you set your lens to manual focus to start. Now you must set your lens to the infinity symbol. DON'T go all the way over to the end (past infinity). Set your aperture to the lowest you can get (f/4 or lower) and put your exposure to 30 seconds. ISO needs to be around 1600. After setting this up, you pretty much have everything ready. Now you just go outside during the middle of the night and shoot for around two or three hours. This will take tons of photos (obviously) and afterward, you just use the imaging software known as StarStaxx to compile the pictures to create that circular effect. After that you're pretty much done!

I'll tell you guys how it goes after I try this myself!

Just Incredible...
Creds to Astro Pixels

A Dope Weekend: Part 2

Hey so this is my second part of 'A Dope Weekend'! Since the last section was on the hockey, this section is on the photography part! So I had been researching even MORE long exposure stuff, and came upon some beach long exposures. These looked crazyyyy but I didn't really know how to do them. So I ended up finding a solid description, and it ended up being a Nikon article (and you all know I dislike Nikon). So this article gave me a good description on long exposures with water as well as any type of long exposure. Another good article on the Nikon site is the article that's strictly on water exposures, which is what helped me the most with the shots I took. What I learned the most was about the ISO and the f stop. These two things did the most for me in my shots. So here's my account of taking beach pictures in SoCal.

Issues:

Well I thought I might as well tell you the issues I had first because well, there were a few. One of my main issues was pretty obvious. What's one thing that's all over the beach? Sand. Sand has always scared me with cameras for a few reasons. Sand always gets in the worst places; including the lens or the internal parts of the camera. Sand will ruin your camera and your lens pretty quickly, so you have to make sure to be super careful around any type of sand or dirt. Water was also an issue while I was trying to get some shots underneath the pier. Waves would spray up and I nervously tucked my back around my camera so it wouldn't get wet. By the end of the day I was pretty wet, but it was all worth it. One of the last issues I had was waiting for people to move out of the way to get the right shot. To be completely honest, people are OBNOXIOUS. Like if you see me with my eye up to the camera, you could at least quicken your pace so I don 't have to wait for three hours to take a single picture. And the worst part is that there is a CONSTANT flow of people walking by, so it's very frustrating. Other than having the issue of sand, water, and people, the beach trip was turned out to be very fun.

Achievements:

A lot of things went really well for me this weekend on the beach. For one, the long exposure shots came out pretty good, and there were a few that I really enjoyed. These came out well because of the websites I told you about earlier. If I had no previous knowledge on beach long exposures, then I would've failed miserably, because there were some settings I used that I wouldn't have guessed of using. These settings had to do with mainly the f stop, but also had to do with ISO and things similar to those. Even though I had some previous knowledge, I still had to experiment quite a bit with the exposures. I realized that you had to take the shots wayy later than one would have expected. In example photos these shots seemed to be taken right at sunset but in reality they were taken almost an hour after the sunset. So after all this talk, I'll show you how they turned out!

This looks like a water color painting to me....

The photo above was the second photo I took under the pier, and it turned out better than the first one I took.

This seems really edited but it's not...

I took this photo before I took the shots under the pier. Even though both of these photos look as though they were taken right at sunset, they were taken almost an hour after sunset. This was a fun shoot, so I hope you guys liked the photos as much as I do! My next blog post will most likely be on hockey so I'll talk to you soon!

I'm a Pyro!

Hey!! I haven't talked to you guys in forever how have you been? Well I've been pretty good and it's been a good year so far, especially in photography! About a few weeks ago, Bennett Barbosa (a.k.a Barbosa Media Co.) and I went out for a little photo shoot! Of course, Bennett and I aren't generally the modeling type, but for this kind of modeling we weren't the focus. This modeling also included moving a dog leash continually as fast as you could. Now this doesn't sound like a normal type of photo shoot does it? Well it definitely wasn't....

What Bennett and I found on the Internet was something quite out of the ordinary. This project was similar to our previous light painting (look to my long exposure post), but this project was with fire. So basically, we lit some stuff on fire and spun it around on a leash for around thirty seconds. This was a really fun project, although there were a few hazards that came with the cool shots.

This was a very fun project, so I'll describe how we did it and what we used to make such a cool and fun photog project. So like I said, I found this project just searching for interesting photo ideas, and when I first saw it, I was perplexed as well as very interested; so I decided to research it and possibly attempt to take some photos like that. It ended up to be less complicated than I had originally thought. So here were the main 'ingredients' that were necessary for success in this photo shoot: a decent camera,  a tripod, some steel wool (preferably a 00 grade or lower), a dog leash/rope, a whisk (yes, the kitchen utensil), some matches and a place that won't explode in flames once the sparks begin to fly. Another smart idea is to wear clothes that won't be singed easily, because sparks do fly right onto you once you begin twirling the lit wool. So after Bennett and acquired all of this supplies, we headed out to the White Barn near St. Mary's to shoot. We left my house around 8:30, because it was starting to get pretty dark by that time. Once we got to the White Barn, we didn't know where to actually shoot these photos, because if we did them too close to the White Barn we'd scorch a historic part of Park City. So we decided it'd be better to do it off to the side, where a ton of dry grass was (good idea, right?). Luckily we still had a little snow at that point, so we could easily put out a fire if it were to ignite the grass. So once we found our spot, we decided that it was still a little too bright to try and shoot. So 45 minutes later we decided to try it out. It was an awkward thing to do, and it was REALLY hard to ignite the steel wool with matches when your fingers were completely numb from the cold. So we tried it, and the first attempt came out exactly how we wanted it to. We weren't expecting the first attempt of this experiment to come out how we wanted it but it did.

My first time to ever model...

After that first success I wanted to take a picture of Bennett. I told him to try a different arc path with the dog leash, and he ended up making an insanely cool one. This attempt was much cooler than mine, although it was all because of the arc, and you know, my skills ;) . But anyways, we only got the chance to take two other photos, and they didn't turn out too well. So in the end, we learned a ton about how to take those types of photos but also had lots of fun taking them.

My photo of Bennett-- These were like fireworks...

Long Exposure to the Rescue!

Hey what's up homies! Today I'm gonna be talking about photography! Usually I'll switch off weeks between hockey and photography, so I decided the first week should be about photog! So I have a friend by the name of Bennett Barbosa and he's a great videographer and photographer! Go check out Barbosa Media Co. on Facebook to learn more. Barbosa Media Co. and I have teamed up together to become Next Level Media, a company that makes videos and also takes photos!

So this post is mainly about troubleshooting and experiences with long exposure shots. So far I have used long exposure twice. Both times using this technique has been with Bennett. The first time using long exposure was over the summer late at night. At first, our challenge was to get some star pictures (in the sky, not of me). We were using an LED light to light up an aspen tree to attract more light to get a better picture, and then we realized something. We could use the LED light to draw things while the camera was taking the picture! I know this sounds quite confusing, but a picture will explain it. While the long exposure was taking place, one of us would run and make a shape of some sort with the LED light. When the full picture was taken, we'd run back to the camera to check out the pic. A few of the pictures were wayyy sweet, while others looked like they were super photoshopped. The settings for this long exposure shot were: 6400 ISO, an aperture of around 2-3, and you also must focus on the spot where you will be creating the shape. Also, with long exposure shots, it's necessary to use a tripod, or else the photo will come out very blurry due to the fact that the camera takes a picture for seconds at a time. If the picture was taken properly, you may end up with a picture as great as this photo below. Before you start commenting mean things about how weird my face is, let's just focus on the background okay?

Taken with a Canon T3i

Another shot from the same night:

Also taken with a Canon T3i

Both of these were taken with the same camera with the same settings.

The second time I used long exposure was truly for night sky purposes (with one exception). The same settings were used except we shot the photos at an earlier time. 

Canon T3

Here's one of my favorite shots from the last shoot I did with Barbosa Media Co..

Canon T3 near the Jewish Temple

Another way long exposure is cool is by using it with highways and moving vehicles. When the photo is taken for a longer period of time, lights start to blur. So when car lights drive by, it creates sort of a streak of yellow and red light. The one that I have taken isn't the greatest, but it shows how you could get started with those types of shots.

Long Exposure with Canon T3 near the White Barn

So with all of these different ways that I've taught you to take long exposure shots, there's no reason I shouldn't be seeing multiple Instagram/Facebook/Twitter posts with exposure shots like these.