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As promised, here is part 2 of the Workshop. Weather cooperated for the most part. Nice sunny skies and a couple of nights where the clouds stayed away until about 4:30am. Gave us time to experiment with some star trails and Milky Way shooting. Of course the days were gorgeous with the sun holding out until late in the day.

We took the group to the “Green River Overlook” in the Canyonlands Nat. Park. It was not looking great when we got there but the sun peaked out from the clouds just before setting to give everyone a chance to get some great shots.

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2014-MOab_1440_1_2_tonemappedSnake and I taught a couple of lessons on how to do night shooting and star-trails and was surprised by the number of students that were willing to get up at 1:00 AM to go try what they had learned. We split the group and went to several locations. Concentrating on Star-trails first since the Milky Way would not be in the sky until about 3:00 AM. After a little experimenting – the exposure for the the star-trails was ISO 800 – 3 min exposures at 5.6 -stacking 26 exposures using a free piece of software called “Star Stacker”. Simple to use and the results were outstanding.

Balance Rock startrail-cropedAfter and hour or so of star-trails – the Milky Way started rising in the SE and it was time to drive home that lesson. Several tried not just stills but also time-lapse shooting of the Milky Way. All were successful in capturing lovely images of something that is rarely seen in the light polluted areas of the country,

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2014-MOabUnfortunately the evening was cut short by the clouds arriving about 4:30 as they had the night before.  It was an enjoyable evening – and I think everyone felt that 4 hours out in the cold was well worth the images they got.

This workshop is part of the “His Light Workshops” (link in the Part 1 post). The students were fantastic and a fun crowd to be with. Lots of new friends and I look forward to seeing them again somewhere down the road.

Thanks for following along. Next stop is the Sun-n-Fun airshow later this week.

 

Here is a link to 30 secs of video on Vimeo of the two nights shooting time-lapse of the Milky Way. It clouded over each night after about 1 1/2 hours so I ran the two clips together. Exposure was 20 sec at 2.8 with Nikkor 14-24mm – 3 frames per minute.

 https://vimeo.com/90695818

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9 Comments

  1. Absolutely gorgeous!!!! Thank you for sharing!

  2. Fantastic stuff, you did great!

  3. Great stuff, I want to be you when I grow up. The Masters won’t be the same without the Nikon Bill’s !
    We miss you guys
    D

  4. Nice music and great video…… it was great being there with you and watching you do your thing.

  5. Magnificent images !!!! Why should I be surprised?
    I wished I was there. Perhaps another time but with you.

  6. Wow, all the way around. Nice work.

  7. Bill, Did you use the Time Lapse function in the camera and let it put the images together in a movie, or did you shoot interval images and put the images together in a movie?

    I did a similar time lapse over Ngorongoro Crater last week using the Time Lapse function. 3 hours, 3 images per minute, yielded about 10 sec of video.

    Headed to Moab and Monument Valley this next week…..

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