Questions And Answers:
Questions and Answers:
What color is the night sky?
Question: (more like a comment) Great composition and exposure, but the Milky Way is not blue, the color balance is not correct.
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/color.of.the.night.sky/
Answer: Thanks for looking, and thanks for the comment. Much appreciated.
What color is the night sky? Excellent article you mentioned:
www.clarkvision.com/articles/color.of.the.night.sky/
I have been thinking about writing about this for a while, so thanks for stimulating me. Please bear with me for a few minutes.I have had this conversation multiple times, actually being on both sides of the argument. It took me a long time to come to a conclusion on how I wanted to present the night sky.
I actually agree with you entirely, the darkest night sky is a warmer color physically, but...
There is a difference between:
1) What color the night sky really is optically (we cannot see the real colors because our night vision is mostly B&W).
2) What we perceive the night sky color to be (our eyes are poor receptors at night), and what our eyes actually perceive is not what we may remember or what the colors really are. By the way, different people have somewhat differing ability to see color at night.
3) and what we remember the color of the night sky to be.
For events that we see repeatedly, like looking at the night sky (or going to the beach, etc.), it has been shown that we do not remember every detail in every instance of looking at the night sky. We may remember the meteor we saw that night, but our memory fills in the background details, like the color of the night sky, the smell of night air or desert air, the feel of chill on your skin, etc., with a combined memory of conglomeration of all the night skies we have seen. When you replay the memory in your mind you remember the unique details, and the background is filled in from averaged memories.
So... if you think about it, most people see most night skies in light polluted places or with a moon in the sky, all of which makes the sky lighter and bluer. The moon is above us more often than not, and lightens the sky, and that is what we mostly remember, a bluish sky.When I started out I thought the night sky was black.
When I got out there in the really dark places, it was not black. I look at photos with black skies and that is not what I see out there. Never. The sky also never looks brown to me, unless there is smoke on the horizon. It never looks brown. As I stand out there for hours and hours, it looks to me to be a deep blue tending towards back. It mostly looks "dark" in away that is hard to explain.
I have processed them every way you can think of, including like in the article you quoted. It's actually a lot easier that way. When you make the Milky Way warmer and yellow brown (forget about airglow for now), the background sky, especially near the horizon frequently turns brownish. It has never looked that way to me in person, in weeks and weeks of being out at night. It just looks unnatural to me.
So what do you do? Well, the answer in photo circles seems to be you do just about anything you want.
Once I got in a discussion with a very famous and respected photographer about the color of the sky. At that time I was arguing the point from the view you take. I finally asked what color is the night sky?His answer was "any color I want it to be". It bothered me at first, but less over time.
So, do you want to make a photo that is true to physics, but is not what anyone can ever see (and at times may be ugly), or make an idealized view of the sky, or simply try to make a work of art, or something people can identify with?
It is a question each person has to answer for themselves, and the answer will be different each time.
For me, I decided, for now, to try to make a work of art that people can identify with. Next year my choice may be different.
Cheers, and thanks for stimulating me to finally write this down!
Wayne Pinkston
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Questions and Answers
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Q: Do you worry about rattlesnakes in the desert at night?
A: You can bet I do keep a lookout for rattlesnakes at night! I am very conscious of where I step, and wear really high boots. It's not what most people think of with night photography, but I try to make sure I come back alive! It's a different world out there with limited vision (darkness), but a really beautiful world. I love it! In a more general sense you have to pay attention to where you and walking and what you are doing, and generally move slowly and carefully. A bigger danger is climbing on large rocks and boulders at night. When you turn the lights off you really need to know where you can move your feet.
The Aged and the Ageless by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook This is a Bristlecone Pine encompassed by the Milky Way. One is the oldest individual species on earth, and the stars are the oldest thing we can see. For perspective, a human generation is estimated to be the average time between the birth of a mother and the average birth of her children, approximately 25 years. Bristlecone Pines are the longest living single multicellular species on earth, living up to and beyond 5,000 years. That is basically the length of recorded human history, 200 generations. The Milky Way above is estimated to be 13.21 billion years old, and the universe 13.77 billion years old, so the life of the Bristlecone Pines are but a blink of the eye. Since the light from the stars and galaxies can take millions or billions off years to reach us, when we look at the night sky we are looking back towards the beginning of time. Thanks for all the kind comments! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family for all the support and encouragement! Cheers, Wayne
Portal by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook This is massive Natural Bridge or Arch. Low Level Lighting (LLL) used to illuminate the scene. There are 2 Goal Zero Micro Lanterns hidden under the arch to illuminate the undersurface. There is a Cineroid LED light panel on a light stand to my left to illuminate the foreground, and 2 more small lights illuminating the far ridge. With a structure this massive it can be a bit of work to get the lighting even. Lots of repositioning and reshooting. This is a vertical panorama with the images taken horizontally and the series of images sweeping upwards. 14-24 mm lens, 14 mm, f/2.8, 20 sec., ISO 6400.
Visions of an Alien Land by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Bisti Badlands, New Mexico Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Big thanks to the wonderful Flickr family out there. Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog
Coral Sea Milky Way by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This is a vertical panorama taken on the NE coast of Australia between the towns of Cairns and Port Douglas, in the region of the Great Barrier Reef. This part of the Pacific is called the Coral Sea. This is a stack of 8 horizontal image stacked vertically, each horizontal image taken with a Canon 16-35 mm lens at 16 mm, f 2.8, 30 sec, ISO 8000. So this image is pretty wide as well as "tall". From the perspective of an observer from the Northern Hemisphere, the Milky Way is fascinating in the Southern Hemisphere, and presents its own unique challenges. Here I am talking about the arch MW as a whole, and not just the core. First, the Milky Way arches high overhead at this time of year (April). The arch starts out lower on the horizon, but as the night progress it rapidly assumes a position high overhead. As a result the MW in the early night is a lot like the MW arch in the NH (Northern Hemisphere) in early spring, and then later in the night it is a lot like the NH MW in late summer and fall (more vertical) where it meets the horizon. Another difference is that the core of the MW is in the middle of the MW arch, and not near the horizon as we commonly see in the NH. As a result you need a really wide field of view or stacked panorama images to get good photos of the core and landscape at the same time. As a result you see a lot of panoramas of the MW taken from the SH (Southern Hemisphere). As for this image, it was taken after Moonset at around 2:30 pm. By this time the MW core was high in the sky, and I used a vertical stack to include the core. Since we did not plan the trip around night photography, I had to take the chances available, and this night I had a couple of good hours of shooting, after Moonset, but before the MW core got to high. A couple of nights later the MW was just about directly overhead before the Moon set, high enough to cause problems. When it is that high it is hard to include much landscape. This was probably as clear as mud. Hope you enjoy! Thanks in advance for taking the time to look and comment.
Whispers of the Past by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook An old house in New Mexico. Lighting with Low Level Lighting with a Gaol Zero Micro Lantern. There are 2 exposures for focus stacking, one for the foreground and one for the sky, both at 14 mm. Sky shot at 15 sec., f 4.5, 15 sec., and ISO 10,000, foreground shot at 25 sec., f 4.5, and ISO 10,000. I shot the foreground at f 4.5 to get more depth of field and forgot to change it for the sky. Oops... Thanks for all the kind support over the last year, it is much appreciated! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family!
My interpretation of the year 2020 🤔 Maybe I should save this one for Halloween? lol Stacked image, one stack for foreground, one for sky (focus stacking). 13 images each, 24 mm f/1.4 lens at f/2.8, 13 sec, ISO 5000. A long time ago in a desert far, far away. Goodbye 2020! Excited about the prospects for 2021! (at American Southwest) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJeJamoBw0F/?igshid=chpg11mipabs
Lost in a Dream... by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Hoodoo in the Valley of Dreams East, in the Badlands region of NW New Mexico.
The Two Legged Hoodoo by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook Valley of Dreams, New Mexico. Nikon D810A camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens, at f 2.8, 14 mm, 25 sec., and ISO 6400. There is lighting with Low Level Lighting. For a tutorial please look here: www.lowlevellighting.org For more images like this please take a look at my website here . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. Cheers, Wayne
Delicate Arch by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook The world doesn’t really need another photo of Delicate Arch, lol, but it took me multiple tries to get a clean image, so I’m posting it anyway. I have been thwarted by clouds, wildfires, and people, and on one occasion when I took friends there I even found that I forgot to put my camera n my backpack! Note to self: If you forget your camera then you might as well forget the tripod as well. 😳 Anyway, the locations so crowded I started dreading going there. This time everyone went home by 1:00 a.m. and I had the location to myself for 1-2 hours until the clouds rolled in. Yeah!!! By the time I poised in the arch the clouds had arrived, so I removed my silhouette from the cloudy photo and placed it into the clear sky photo, so this is a blend. Thanks for looking!
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wayne-pinkston reblogged this · 9 years ago
