A D600 Night at Knowlton church

I always feel like I need to start these posts with a: "So the weather is nice tonight" but I think I'll skip it this time by, instead, describing how I'm not going to do it...
Anyway, it was a clear night tonight so... damn it!

Tonight was to be my first truly clear night for a test-run with the D600 but as it turned out the moon rose the moment I arrived and washed the sky out. So no real milkyway on view but still, it was nice to get out for a change and let me try out the new D600 with a little more knowledge as to how it works. (Having read the manual.)

Here are the shots. I tried out some varying ISO speeds for noise comparison with my older D90 shots.

ISO 800

ISO 800

ISO 800

ISO 800

ISO 2000

ISO 3200

Not sure if there is much to learn from this exercise in retrospect to be honest. I shall try again on a darker night.

Supermoon and the Great Globe

Scouting a new location today with a bit of new equipment.
It's early in the evening with a full moon, (The Supermoon no less) so no real intention to get star photos but a genuine hope to find good spots for future shoots.

Now Durlston Head is part of a country park at the tip of the Purbecks tucked just behind Swanage. The key spots I wanted to see at Durlston head were:

1. Durlston Castle (I was not optimistic i'd get a good angle tbh)
2. The Great Globe (A large globe statue positioned below the castle)
3. Anvil Point Lighthouse
4. Tilly Whim caves (Again, I was not optimistic I could do much with them)

So a location with lots of potential. I did the trip with my brother, sister and her dog.

First up I had a stab at shooting the moon. (I'm still not terribly good at it and I was hoping to get a nice angle so as to frame a person silhouetted against it.

I cheated to get this. I moved the moon in post-processing.

Notice however how big the moon is, that's how big the supermoon is in reality through a 85mm lens(100% crop).

A lot of photos like the one used to head this article: link. Showed up during the supermoon event showing the moon being way, way more than the 14% bigger that it actually was, all of them were fakes.

Beautiful fakes but frustrating ones. It implies that things exist that can't and gives the impression that photographs are possible that aren't.

This is the supermoon through my longest zoom lens(200mm)

This is Fella, my sisters dog.

The Great Globe.

This stone monument is a great subject matter for future star-shoots. The fencing is a bit inconvenient but we'll see what I can do.

I will be back for this.

A Night at Lulworth Cove

This evening was spent at Lulworth Cove.
It was not intended to be a proper trip as it's a week-night but the weather was good and it needed to be taken advantage. I relaised I've nto really done much at Lulworth Cove itself. Often at places accessed via Lulworth Cove but not so much the place itself.

One thing I didn't know about Lulworth Cove is that to the right of the cove(West) there are large rock formations jutting out of the sea, so, immediately upon discovering this the first sequence of shots was determined and formed quite the distraction.

Due to the number of images and a couple of animated .gifs I've split this post up.
Please click below to read on...

Nine Barrow Down - Obelisk

Tonight myself, my sister and my father went out to a new spot I noticed while browsing google maps during my initial route planning for the Agglestone trip.

Again this was just a scouting run, primarily to find the location and secondly to assess it for future use.
It's up on the top of one of several hills in the  among the Purbeck Hills called Nine Barrow Down and is situated above the town of Swanage.
The Obelisk was apparently originally built in 1883(not sure why) but was later taken down during the War as they were worried it would prove to be a landmark for Air Raids. It was later replaced in 1952, slightly shorter than before as I understand it as one section of it is damaged and put to one side. (It may have been replaced)

As it turns out, it's not the greatest spot. Whilst the Obelisk itself is a nice feature to shoot it's located right between Swanage and Bournemouth/Poole which just nukes the sky with light pollution.

The result of this isn't awful pictures but it is a reduced number of stars and it certainly means I'm not going to get the milkyway so much from here. So I cracked out the glowsticks!

A nice clean spin on the fairy-lights... for comparison the next shgot is just a manic, nun-chuck swinging of the fairy-lights.

Then I finally remembered to try out my laser, which is inexplicably part of my emergency battery pack, which I have in case I need to recharge my phone or something in an emergency.

I'm not keen on the results tbh, I'll play with it more another time though. It's easy to make marks with but it's hard to make something that looks nice. I tried writing my name(ignore the backwards "y") which looks fine but it's very scribbly and messy... and not very interesting really.

An evening at Moors Valley Country Park

This evening the weather was fairly tentative and as it's a week-night so I decided to do a scout rather than a full evening's shoot so we did a run down to Moors Valley Country park.

The car park is closed at dusk so gaining access is not so easy but I'm no stranger to a long walk, it's more of a challenge to find a place to park but once that was done it was plain sailing.

There's not much to say really. Moors Valley Country park is just that, a country park, but it has lots of great little handmade playgrounds made of wood, dotted around, almost randomly in the forest. They all have awesome amounts of potential, either with carefully placed lighting or with stars blazing between the branches of the trees above.

Due to the number of images and some animations please click the following link to read further...

Removing the Noise

 So! Noise!

One of the biggest problems I have with my night/astro-photography is noise.
I shoot at around 800 ISO to keep the amount of noise I'm afflicted by to a minimum whilst still maximising the amount of light my camera(A Nikon D90) is picking up.

I won't go into the details really. I'm only using readily available plugins and bits and bobs but I thought I'd post some comparison shots of older photos I have taken where I have always regretted the amount of noise in, next to images with some noise reduction used.

It was difficult to tweak the noise however without tweaking a few other things which is why you may notice some slightly more drastic differences in the images.

In some cases I think the noise reduction I've done  is still not quite enough, I'm not sure.

If you know any anti-noise techniques and would like to share them please do. Either leave a comment below or feel free to contact me. I'd be very interested.

A Sunset over Studland

A quick trip over the Sandbanks ferry today to try out some sunset photography down on Studland beach where I knew there to be an... arrangement? Of concrete blocks that form what I imagine is meant to be a groyne. (It's the only one there though)

It could be an old sea defence, I don't know but I thought it would form a useful leading-line in a landscape shot and hoped the "partial cloud" forecast might provide an interesting sky.

Here are the shots: