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Author Topic: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal  (Read 22061 times)

John R Smith

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #20 on: April 22, 2012, 04:28:28 pm »

Here is a similar shot without as many star trails from a photographer I greatly admire, Yan Zhang.

Hmmm.

So now we've got the foreground anchor, long exposure with the misty water, and the star trails . . .

Sorry, Chris, I just couldn't resist it  ;)

It is rather a nice picture.

John
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framah

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #21 on: April 22, 2012, 06:00:54 pm »


And...
Slobodan: "I also find the sheer amounts of it [star trails] in this particular photo rather excessive."
dreed: "The star trails are over done."
...to criticize the number of stars!! Give me a break - you guys need to get out more often! That's what the sky looks like in true wilderness away from noise polluted cities! How can you criticize Mother Nature for having too many stars!! Or perhaps you want the photographer to brush a few out!


This reminds me of the part in the movie Amadeus where the King tells Mozart that the piece has too many notes. Amadeus asks, "which ones would the King have me take out?"

I personally like the shot and can imagine the cold biting places that shouldn't be bitten!! :o
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Isaac

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #22 on: April 22, 2012, 07:05:41 pm »

In this case, it wasn't posted in "User Critiques" but in a more general forum.

Well, if we're going to start taking the forum names and descriptions seriously - exactly which "technical and aesthetic issues" of "Landscape & Nature Photography" were discussed in the original posting? :-)

afaict some of the forum names and descriptions are not a good indication of what goes on in the discussion forum; so, as it seems to be what you'd really like to see, by all means campaign to have this forum renamed:

  • User Encouragement -  A "safe house" where user submitted photographs are approved and admired.

No, I'm not being sarcastic - so something less kindergarten:

  • Landscape & Nature Photography -  A "safe house" where user submitted photographs may be admired.

« Last Edit: April 23, 2012, 12:56:01 pm by Isaac »
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shadowblade

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #23 on: April 22, 2012, 07:20:05 pm »

I, for one, would like Shadowblade to tell us how he managed a 45-minute exposure (I assume, on a digital camera, but may have been with film – he doesn't say) without a level of noise that overwhelms the photo. As well, how is it that your batteries didn't give out at that temperature? On a manual, mechanical film camera, I can understand, but on a digital??

I was running at the extreme end of battery life in that temperature. I had a heat pack over the lens (to prevent fogging) while leaving the body in the cold, to minimise noise from heat. I also performed a dark frame subtraction on the final image.
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shadowblade

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #24 on: April 22, 2012, 07:27:37 pm »

I would have liked to take a photo with just the stars (no trails) and moonlit mountain, but, with the short exposure time required to avoid motion blurring of the stars at 100mm, this just wasn't possible. Also, a shot of the Milky Way at 100mm is somewhat less impressive than a wider vista taken at, say, 21mm.

In any case, the shot was never about the star trails - it was about the moonlit mountain. The trails, running in the direction that they are, were intended as a tool to help frame the mountain and provide balance to the shot (instead of a more-or-less detailless sky, as would have been the case if I had skipped the first 44 minutes prior to moonrise, then just exposed the moonlit mountain), rather than being the subject of the shot in their own right.

Also, this shot was taken in early 2009 - there seems to have been a proliferation of star trails shots since then, often with no point of interest other than the trails themselves, which has made star trails rather 'cliche' since then...
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shadowblade

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #25 on: April 22, 2012, 07:45:37 pm »

fwiw on a small screen if I try to look just at the mountain, my eyes are pulled back to the star trails again and again - they're high-contrast high-attention. Maybe that's different with a large print, maybe there's more space between the individual star trails.

Not so much on a 20x30" or 40x60" print - if I may say so, it looks fairly spectacular printed large on Bay Photo's MetalPrints.

The JPEG compression and inevitable sharpening associated with downsizing doesn't help the web image.
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shadowblade

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #26 on: April 22, 2012, 08:29:07 pm »

Hmmm, wait a minute, have you shown your work at "Palo Alto Festival of the Arts" or "Mountain View Art & Wine Festival"?

No - why?

I'm Australia-based, so never heard of those festivals.
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Petrus

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #27 on: April 23, 2012, 01:53:02 am »

I, for one, would like Shadowblade to tell us how he managed a 45-minute exposure (I assume, on a digital camera, but may have been with film – he doesn't say) without a level of noise that overwhelms the photo. As well, how is it that your batteries didn't give out at that temperature? On a manual, mechanical film camera, I can understand, but on a digital??

Same here, I think my digital cameras have a 30 sec B limit, and the batteries usually run out in less than an hour when doing time-lapse. Even in normal temperatures.
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dreed

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #28 on: April 23, 2012, 02:25:56 am »

And...
Slobodan: "I also find the sheer amounts of it [star trails] in this particular photo rather excessive."
dreed: "The star trails are over done."
...to criticize the number of stars!! Give me a break - you guys need to get out more often! That's what the sky looks like in true wilderness away from noise polluted cities! How can you criticize Mother Nature for having too many stars!! Or perhaps you want the photographer to brush a few out!

Ah, you've misread what I was criticising.

I wasn't taking issue with the number of stars but the length of the star trails. When I'm in the wilderness and I look up at a dark sky, I don't see star trails, I see stars.

I suppose I'm increasingly less impressed with star trails and more impressed by star fields.
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dreed

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #29 on: April 23, 2012, 02:28:59 am »

Hmmm, wait a minute, have you shown your work at "Palo Alto Festival of the Arts" or "Mountain View Art & Wine Festival"?

The same group of stalls are at both and at different cities on other weekends...

They're both in the San Francisco Bay Area and are neighbouring cities/neighbourhoods.

Think of them as being like a large Sunday market but only held one weekend a year (because the group of people that do them can't be at every location, every weekend.)
« Last Edit: April 23, 2012, 02:30:48 am by dreed »
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dreed

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #30 on: April 23, 2012, 02:39:24 am »

In any case, the shot was never about the star trails - it was about the moonlit mountain. The trails, running in the direction that they are, were intended as a tool to help frame the mountain and provide balance to the shot (instead of a more-or-less detailless sky, as would have been the case if I had skipped the first 44 minutes prior to moonrise, then just exposed the moonlit mountain), rather than being the subject of the shot in their own right.

IMHO, the length of the star trails tip the balance away from the mountain... I don't think that it is a good mix.

I would have liked to have seen this with a 5 minute or shorter exposure time around the time of or just after the moonrise.

Or in other words, you should have done more experimentation with shutter time and how much detail you got from 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minute shots around the time of moon rise.
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shadowblade

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #31 on: April 23, 2012, 02:42:31 am »

IMHO, the length of the star trails tip the balance away from the mountain... I don't think that it is a good mix.

I would have liked to have seen this with a 5 minute or shorter exposure time around the time of or just after the moonrise.

Or in other words, you should have done more experimentation with shutter time and how much detail you got from 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minute shots around the time of moon rise.

I've never been a fan of short trails - they look like an unintentional mistake, rather than an intentional exposure.

For me, it's either long trails, or no trails at all.
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Tony Jay

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #32 on: April 23, 2012, 04:19:29 am »

FWIW I am with shadowblade on the points he has raised.

Short startrails don't look right.
Startrails are bit like an interesting cloudy sky at sunset - an essential backdrop to the real subject of the image.

Also as much as one likes to post good pics assuming that a large print at full resolution will look the same as the massively downresed images posted on LuLa doesn't stand scrutiny.
All of the images I have posted look much better, sometimes spectacularly so, as large prints.

Dare I say it - as much as shadowblade rattles my cage I look forward to seeing his next image post.

Regards

Tony Jay
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dreed

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #33 on: April 23, 2012, 05:59:39 am »

I've never been a fan of short trails - they look like an unintentional mistake, rather than an intentional exposure.

For me, it's either long trails, or no trails at all.

Right, no trails would have been my preference for this shot and to have seen you attempt to see what you could get away with in terms of exposure time vs trail length. When there are long star trails then it is usually the star trails that are the subject of the image. In this case, that's not the case.

Also, what could you have done with some masking and merging a short exposure of the sky with a longer one to get the mountains?
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shadowblade

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #34 on: April 23, 2012, 06:09:26 am »

Right, no trails would have been my preference for this shot and to have seen you attempt to see what you could get away with in terms of exposure time vs trail length. When there are long star trails then it is usually the star trails that are the subject of the image. In this case, that's not the case.

Since I was using a fairly long lens (105mm) the frame actually looked quite empty and devoid of stars - it's not like when you're shooting with a wide-angle lens and have a large section of the sky in view.

Quote
Also, what could you have done with some masking and merging a short exposure of the sky with a longer one to get the mountains?

Capturing the mountain wasn't the problem - I could have done that with a few seconds of exposure around the start of moonrise. But, to capture the stars, I would have needed a longer exposure (shooting at ISO 100) - at 100mm, you can't have more than a few seconds of exposure without developing short trails, which is why most night sky photos which don't have trails and aren't taken using a tracking mount (which would make it impossible to have any non-celestial features in the photo) are taken at wide angles. Not to mention, as I said earlier, there just weren't all that many stars in that small patch of sky covered by the lens.
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Keith Reeder

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #35 on: April 24, 2012, 12:07:15 pm »

Thanks for sharing Shadowblade - don't let the turkeys get you down! Keep shooting what you like shooting. If others find it "ubiquitous, cliche and kitsch" - ignore them.

So aren't you saying in essence that you only consider responses to a C&C request (albeit in the wrong forum) to be acceptable if they respond with banal, bland approval?

Seriously Terry, what's the point of that?

There are any number of places on the 'Net where gushing approbation of anything is almost guaranteed, so isn't it a good thing that some people here are prepared to risk the wrath of the Nice Police by being honest about their reservations?

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Keith Reeder
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John R Smith

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #36 on: April 24, 2012, 01:52:15 pm »


Well, excuse me - but -

There is nothing in the title of this Forum sub-section to suggest that nobody is allowed to voice an opinion about the merits or demerits of a posted photograph. It says -

Landscape & Nature Photography (and underneath) Nature Photography - technical and aesthetic issues

One would imagine that such a heading invites debate, particularly debate regarding "technical and aesthetic issues". Which would seem to be the case in this particular thread.

John
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John R Smith

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #37 on: April 24, 2012, 03:13:53 pm »

I think there have been half-a-dozen occasions over the last few months when someone's expectations have been upset because a photo was criticised rather than admired (or ignored).

Is there a reason not to have a place where user photos are submitted for admiration as well as a place where user photos are submitted for critique? If not then let's have the title and description changed to match how this forum is actually being used.

So - just to get this quite clear - you are asking for this section to be a place where photos are posted, and the replies to them may only be ones of approval or approbation? That is the ground rule? And if, as a viewer, you do not like the photograph or feel that certain aspects of it are weak and could be improved, you may think this but you are not allowed to say so?

John
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Enda Cavanagh

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #38 on: April 24, 2012, 03:21:45 pm »

It does get a bit confusing to know here who the Hell is arguing with who.!! ;D

John R Smith

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Re: Moonrise over Manaslu - Nepal
« Reply #39 on: April 24, 2012, 03:56:16 pm »


Well, Isaac, I have to say that I am jolly pleased that you and Terry have got everything really well sorted out here. It's always much more reassuring to know exactly where you stand when posting on a forum like this. And I'm sure that everybody else who posts here is very grateful to you too. Now just remember, chaps - no nasty criticism! You can think it, but you musn't say it!

 ;) John
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