Thunder Hole – Redux
Acadia National Park, Maine
I posted another version of this shot recently but I’m not happy with it anymore, so I started from scratch and re-processed it. Originally I pushed the image heavily towards blue to take out a lot of the green airglow color out of the sky, but this time I chose to feature a more natural colored sky, I still punched it up a bit for contrast, but the green glow in the sky is real, it is from airglow (see below for description). The sky doesn’t look like this to your eye at night but the camera is capable of seeing much more light during a long exposure, so the actual colors of the sky come out in the photographs.
Airglow is a natural phenomenon that occurs high up in the atmosphere as molecular particles emit light when they react to scattered radiation from the sun and various other chemical interactions.
This is a blend of 3 main images, but technically 7 exposures. The sky is made up of 5 exposures at ISO 6400 f/2.8 for 10 seconds each, which are then stacked with Starry Landscape Stacker (available for Mac only, but you can do this in Photoshop) to achieve pinpoint stars and lower noise than a single ISO 3200 shot for 25 seconds would have yielded. The foreground is from two other exposures, 1 at ISO 1600 f/2.8 for 20 minutes, and another at ISO 1600 f/5.6 for 30 seconds with light painting with a flashlight on the rocks and green seaweed in the bottom part of the foreground. All shots were at 14mm, using my Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens on my Nikon D800E.
You can read much more about my process in my tutorial "Introduction to Landscape Astrophotography" on the Luminous Landscape website: www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/night_sky___astrophotog…
Starry Landscape Stacker is available in the Mac App Store.
#ThunderHole #Acadia #Maine #Milkyway #night #stars #astrophotography
Posted by Adam Woodworth on 2014-07-22 02:17:54
Tagged: , acadia , astrophotography , atlantic ocean , maine , milky way , new england , night , seacoast , stars , thunder hole
