Here’s a shot I took, erm, a year ago, play­ing around with ultra long expos­ures. Or, to be more pre­cisely, sim­u­lat­ing an ultra-​long expos­ure by stack­ing many indi­vidual expos­ures.

On the shoot­ing side, I simply set my cam­era to manual mode, 30s expos­ures in con­tinu­ous drive mode and used a lock­able remote release to fire off one shot after another (hav­ing dis­abled the dark-​frame sub­trac­tion func­tion as miss­ing out 30s between each expos­ures pro­duces ugly dot­ted lines rather than smooth trails).

Then, to “merge” the images, there are a fair few pro­grams avail­able. A well work­ing, free and cross-​platform one would be StarStaX.

As you can see in the little EXIF table below, this slightly con­fus­ing and any­thing but pretty photo was taken over the course of 11 h, out the back from our bed­room bal­cony. A bit of math tells you that’s more than 1300 expos­ures, all in the spirit of experimentation…

Apo­lo­gies reg­u­lar read­ers, it is most unlikely this is going to be of any interest or even use to you, but I just wanted to jot this down for pos­ter­i­or­ity.

If you are lucky enough to have access to a Pho­tron Fast­cam and have run into per­form­ance issues, make sure you enable Jumbo Frames on your net­work inter­face and in the Fast­cam Viewer soft­ware (see e.g. here).

How­ever, this recently stopped work­ing for me, and it turned out that although I was set­ting the Jumbo Frames /​Jumbo Packet set­tings in the Win­dows con­trol panel as instruc­ted, this was not actu­ally set in the net­work adapter itself. Only after resort­ing to some com­mand line action I man­aged the set­ting to be actual used, and things worked again with the usual per­form­ance.

Here’s what I used (thanks to this blog post for spelling it out):

To see what inter­faces you have on your com­puter, type

netsh inter­face ipv4 show subin­ter­faces

To change the MTU, type

netsh inter­face ipv4 set subin­ter­face “Local Area Con­nec­tion” mtu=nnnn store=persistent

where

Local Area Con­nec­tion is the name of the net­work con­nec­tion on your com­puter, from the list obtained above, and nnnn is the desired value for MTU.

Reboot after mak­ing the change.

An MTU size of 9014 did it for me, and it worked straight away without rebooting.

I meant to write a post about the “Bren­izer method” for a fair while now, but never got around doing it. Any­way, what are “Bren­izer pan­or­a­mas” or “bokeh pan­or­a­mas” as some people like to call it?

The idea is to cre­ate an image that would be pretty much impossible to achieve with a real lens. Like the one above, which has the look (accord­ing to this cal­cu­lator) of a 30mm ƒ/0.4 lens. Some say, ƒ/0.5 is the limit of what’s phys­ic­ally pos­sible, so that’s some­thing, hey? Also, since you com­bine the images, you will get a very high res­ol­u­tion res­ult, which, down­scaled, will just be super sharp.

Any­way, such images are pro­duced by shoot­ing with a long focal length and wide open aper­ture to achieve a super shal­low depth of field, but then stitch­ing many such images together to get a wider angle cov­er­age of the sub­ject. You can use a pan­or­amic tri­pod head if you want to be pre­cise, but for speed you prob­ably have to work hand­held. The above shot is the com­pos­i­tion of about 60 shots taken with a 135mm lens at ƒ/1.8.

It can be tricky to put the images together, and neither Pho­toshop CS6′s Pho­tomerge nor PTGui did a good job with this one here (half the shots could not be linked auto­mat­ic­ally, in par­tic­u­lar those with mostly blurry parts). Thank­fully, Kolor’s Auto­pano Pro did a bet­ter job, and even if 10 or so images were not auto­mat­ic­ally linked, I could manu­ally add con­trol points fairly quickly to even­tu­ally tie all the images together suf­fi­ciently. Then, I expor­ted it as a Pan­o­tools file, which I could then load and fin­ish off in PTGui (which I am much more famil­iar with and have a license of). Here’s what the pro­ject looked like before export­ing and crop­ping.

Since bokeh (the out of focus bits) will be very prom­in­ent with this tech­nique, you really want to use a lens that is known for good qual­ity bokeh. Also, choose a nicer back­ground than I did for this test (night shots with dis­tant back­ground lights work par­tic­u­larly great).

Here’s one of my last pho­tos from Ger­many, a bit of night sky. Steffi‘s fam­ily home is out in the coun­try side in Ger­many (me being a city boy), so whenever I go there I just love the silence and clar­ity of the sky at night.

On our farewell trip back in Winter, when it was about –10°C, I decided to take one last pic­ture of the night sky, since where we were going would show com­pletely dif­fer­ent con­stel­la­tions (not than I know much about it) and there’s no harm in risk­ing a cold just before embark­ing on a big trip…

Lack­ing any spe­cial photo gear, I shot this with my cam­era and wide angle lens lay­ing on the ground, with a kit­chen towel as sup­port. I then used my cell­phone to light paint the fence and bushes a little bit for ref­er­ence, and to get some extra col­our into the image bey­ond the faint orange back­ground glow from Jerichow. By light paint­ing I mean run­ning around like mad man, con­tinu­ously wav­ing the phone screen in front of my body, at the same time try­ing to block the cam­era from see­ing the phone light dir­ectly (there was a “light leak” though as you can see by the hori­zontal line in the corner of the fence).

Hop­ing you like the dense night sky, best wishes from Aus­tralia again! This blog is com­ing a bit full circle now, since I star­ted it right here in New­castle over six years ago!

We recently drove up to the Hunter Val­ley, a fairly renown wine grow­ing region less than an hour’s drive away. That’s a great thing to have :-) Count­less little wine estates and cel­lar doors to try wine at a decent enough prices. Good fun!

The tour also took us by this little lookout that offered some lovely views over the val­ley. Unfor­tu­nately, it was a semi-​overcast day, and the first ver­sion of this shot pretty much just had a grey blob of sky at the top. The small little bits of blue sky didn’t come out at all. Thank­fully I packed my polar­ising fil­ter, which was the first thing I tried out. And wun­derbar, it did indeed darken down the blue bits some­what so they they could actu­ally be iden­ti­fied as such.

But there still was a fairly large dif­fer­ence in bright­ness between sky and ground. So I put on the second fil­ter I own (and that’s the only two I have): a gradu­ated neut­ral dens­ity fil­ter. It’s designed to be used with the Cokin fil­ter sys­tem, but I pretty much only used it free-​hand (so just hold the square fil­ter by hand rather than with the fil­ter holder). Much faster that way, and pretty much same res­ult, if you man­age to coordin­ate hold­ing the cam­era, adjust­ing the fil­ter and oper­at­ing the shut­ter at the same time ;-)

What that fil­ter did was bring down the bright­ness of the sky a fair bit, but leave the ground untouched. As the name sug­gests, it’s a fil­ter which is neut­ral dens­ity on one side (so just makes things darker), and clear on the other, with the smooth trans­ition (gradu­ation) in-​between so you don’t notice it that much (it’s the first fil­ter in this list). A very handy tool to have in your photo bag!

Sprinkle a ton of “Clar­ity” dur­ing raw devel­op­ment on top and and that’s how I got these fairly dra­matic skies from the fairly bland look­ing light grey blob the sky was at the time.

Here’s part 6 of my pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial series over on You­Tube. It describes one (of the many) meth­ods of find­ing the no-​parallax point of a lens, and what to look out for with fisheye lenses in par­tic­u­lar.