Northern Lights

Went out to Alkali Creek and took some pictures of the northern lights. Each picture was about a 20 minute exposure. I like the results quite a bit. Focusing is super  hard in the dark, I'm very glad they are focused

Star Trails

I am going to attempt to take star trails this semester. The below site gives good tips on how to start.

Some tips include.
Use 20-30 second exposures stacked to limit noise and hot spots on censors. Have a remote sensor or duck tape the sensor down to not have camera shake. 2-3 hours can get good trails. To stitch the pictures together there are dedicated programs or Photoshop can be used.
Another great tip is go early and plan your shoot so you don't miss twilight to get the foreground.











 http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-photograph-star-trails/

5 Picture

These are 5 of my better pictures from the Yellowstone trip.

ISO200 200mm f/5.6 1/640

I am happy with this picture. I think all my settings were set correctly and am happy with how I composed it. I used a brush to brighten the face of the bison and also brightened the shadows to ring out some more detail in the bison.

ISO200 55mm f/9.0 1/500

 I am mostly happy with this picture. I wish I would have shot an a higher aperture as to get the tree a bit more in focus. It was very foggy so I'm not sure how in focus the tree could have been in through the fog.

ISO100 40mm f/13 1/640

 I really like this picture, it is one of my personal favorites. I took this picture as a landscape and cropped to this aspect ratio. It does not have a high resolution and wont be able to be blown up big but that's not a problem for me because I wont ever blow it up! Im very happy with how this came out regardless of the resolution.

ISO200 200mm f/5.6 1/200

 I'm happy with how this picture came out. The only thing which I think could be improved is to make the mountains in focus. I was limited to f5.6 because I didn't want to raise my ISO  any more and couldn't shoot any longer of an exposure without having blur happen. For the early morning situation with lower light this turned out very well for me.

ISO200 200mm f/10 1/160

I like how the rocks look. The crack in the rock makes this much more interesting to me.

Detail Picture

ISO200 200MM f/5.6 1/400

Yellowstone

These are a quick selection of some of the better pictures I took at Yellowstone. I haven't finished editing all of my pictures yet but these are looking like some of the best. I had a 55mm-200mm lens on a cropped camera at Yellowstone which almost worked perfect. I was unable to get any good pictures of the wolfs or coyotes. Anything somewhat close to me I was able to capture.

Attempting a Sunset

I was up at flight ops and an incredible sunset happened. There was only a small gap between all the infrastructure which I could get a clear picture without light poles, planes, cars, and buildings. I do not know what the best picture is. All I know is that I tried to get every picture possible in hopes one would be good. I shot on 400ISO and f6.3 to f11. it was all hand help so I had to keep a high ISO  and low aperture to keep the shutter speed fast. It was slightly windy so a high shutter speed was needed to prevent blur in the tree. I don't think the entire picture is in focus because of the low aperture settings. I would have rather had the great color and low noise with a little blur than noise and worse color.  

5 Picture

Took on Phone AUTO ISO50 3.94mm f2.4 1/480
Taken on a foggy day in Billings up on the rims. Phone was an auto did a decent job, lightroom really made the picture look great.

 ISO1600 24mm f11 1/2000
I took this driving down a road from Big Sky. For driving photos I wanted everything to be in focus because I had little time to compose the pictures. The high ISO helped me keep the shutter speed high so that I could prevent blur from the driving car. The wide angle also helped to prevent the blur.

 ISO400 200mm f6.3 1/400
I was up at the airport working when I looked outside and saw an incredible sunset. I grabbed my camera climbed onto one of the wings of our planes and took this. I did not have a tripod and it was a bit windy. I needed to zoom in to full 200mm because this was shot between a lot of other airport junk and parked cars and planes. The 1/400 was almost enough to get all the motion blur out of the tree and the f6.3 was almost enough to get the tree in focus. I didn't want to raise my ISO any more because my camera doesn't take great pictures above 400. The colors were too good to try and shoot a higher ISO. I barely rose the saturation and vibrancy on this picture, the colors are very close to true.

 ISO800 135mm f5.0 1/125
I was trying to take more sunset pictures but the sunset didn't get great and the light wasn't good. So I lowered my aperture and took this. The lighting was bad and the picture didn't look good in color.

ISO100 55mm f8 1/250
Took this earlier in the year while on a flight. The picture was taken through the planes window which caused some blur in the right side of the picture. The white balance was on incandescent and my camera was on jpg. This caused the color to be very blue and I could not edit the color to be correct. The picture looks much better in black and white.