Napoleon O’Young
July 2024 - Supertitious Mountain Blend
About the Image(s)
This image is a blend of the mountain taken during blue hour in late April 2024 and the MW is from June 27, 2024 out in the flat desert in Arizona. The MW was captured as the entire arch using about 9 vertical panels and stitched together in PS. Only half of the arch was used here. The two images were blended together as a PS sky replacement process.
The mountain was in a heavily light polluted urban area, probably a Bortle 5 and the MW was taken in a Bortle 3 area.
This genre of night photography has a long learning curve and the post process work is quite extensive specially if the goal is to capture the entire MW Arch in one image.
I hope you have some good constructive criticism for me.
This round’s discussion is now closed!
11 comments posted
I think this is very good photo. I would experiment with cropping from the left to get rid of the unlit plants. I think there is too much black on the bottom and would cross up. Posted: 07/18/2024 04:31:30
Bob, thank you. Those are very valid points to make to improve the image. I totally agree with you. Posted: 07/18/2024 04:46:12
Lovely work Napoleon and you are right - a lot of work goes into many astro images. I this case, it was definitely worth it.
Yes, crop the areas Bob mentioned to make more impact but congratulations on an excellent image. Posted: 07/18/2024 10:06:26
Yes, crop the areas Bob mentioned to make more impact but congratulations on an excellent image. Posted: 07/18/2024 10:06:26
Marvelous capture. Great job of blending the images. I know how hard it is to capture the night sky. Because I live in a big city, with all the light we never see much of the sky. Just for grins, I played with you image by taking it into Lightroom (Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop) and went to create a new mask. I chose the Brush tool and with a feather of about 20% and a flow of 70% I painted the bushes and foreground selectively to lighten up these areas exposure, highlights and whites. I then put a stroke around the image picking out a color from the colors in the sky to delineate the edges since it shows on a black background. Your thoughts? Posted: 07/19/2024 20:19:23
Howard, thank you for your additional contributions to make this image have more impact. Yes, it surely helped. Posted: 07/19/2024 22:48:21
I went back to the RAW file and brightened the foreground grassy area, cropped a bit from the L and R, added slight brightness to the MW.
Posted: 07/19/2024 23:10:51
Posted: 07/19/2024 23:10:51
This is a beautiful image..it gives me a sense of calm
Posted: 07/20/2024 18:02:12
Posted: 07/20/2024 18:02:12
Thank you, Delian. I am like you, often expressing my reaction to a photo as feeling that it evokes in me. Posted: 07/20/2024 18:41:23
Thank you, Delian. I am like you, often expressing my reaction to a photo as feeling that it evokes in me. Posted: 07/20/2024 18:41:23
Napoleon: Given all the negative aspects you are dealing with in this photo, I am impressed by your final image. You managed to circumvent the urban light pollution on the MW quite nicely. An enormous amount of work goes into creating a MW photo especially when dealing with artificial light. Love how you lightened up the lower third (left side) of the image. In all, a great photo Napoleon! Posted: 07/23/2024 22:42:43
Beautiful capture of Milky Way. Very good post-processing also. I would imagine you used a very high iso to take the shot. It is very difficult to deal with light pollution, but I think you captured and handled it very well. Well done. Posted: 07/31/2024 23:17:39