Photo tips, SBS?

[Tortoise]

Not sure where to post this, but I was hoping, Step By Step, that you could give us a few tips re how you got some of your more spectacular images we see in the photo comps. In particular, I'm wondering what sort of settings you use for the night shots with the stars and torch light, and for 'The Photographer' (Dec 2014), which I suspect needed HDR to get good exposure of very different lighting.

Thanks in anticipation!

[stepbystep]

Hi Tortoise

Thanks, pretty chuffed to get a clean sweep. I had a pretty good December with lots of trips which always helps.

'Sleeping with Maatsuyker' - This image was taken on the summit of Mt Counsel on the Bathurst Range. I climbed the range after spending a night at Point Eric, wonderful off track walking.
Night shots have quite a few variables. My settings on my Canon 5D mkII were as follows 13" exposure at ISO 3200 with a Rokinon 14mm lens and the aperture wide open at f2.8. I knew a full-ish moon was rising at about midnight and that is when the variables come in. A full moon floods the landscape with light and makes far less stars visible so I made sure I got this shot prior to that happening. If the moon was up I would get far less stars and I would adjust the ISO accordingly. Probably back it off to 800-1600. I keep the exposure down to 13" otherwise the stars begin to streak.
Composition wise I saw a campsite inside the angled stones and thought that would look awesome, I managed to get my tripod on top of another large stone. The light on the water is actually from a fishing boat that was spraying searchlights about. The Maatsuyker lighthouse is the small lightsourse to the left of that. The pink glow on the horizon is high altitude auroral glow from a very weak fading aurora and the green colouring in the sky is 'airglow'. Shots I took later after the moon rose have none of that colouring. The tent is a Scarp1 which is a silver colour. I made it orange by wrapping my headtorch in a silnylon drybag. I also took some with a yellow drybag. The tent takes whatever colour I want.

Post Processing in Adobe Lightroom
Very little. I boosted the whites by 10% and applied a fair bit of noise reduction, about 70% on the LR slider. At ISO3200 you're always going to get quite a noisy RAW file.

*note every camera is very different, some like the Nikon D810 can handle dark scenes better than the Canon 5DII. The lens will also make a big difference. For example the Canon 16-35 f2.8 is better than my Rokinion 14mm for noise. the Nikon 14-24 better again. Other cameras are possibly not as good as the Canon. It's really a matter of playing with your settings to get the best results. It's essential to get your focus on infinity to get sharp stars. Either mark infinity on your lens during the day or use 'live view' to focus on a bright star or the moon.

Any other questions most welcome, or others with night shooting skills feel free to add to this

'The Photographer'
Not HDR, single shot, I'll get back to you when I can check out what I did with this one. It's one of my favourite images of one of my buddies at play.

OK Tortoise...

ISO100 1/20" exposure at 50mm post processing helped this one a lot, essential to shoot in RAW.
I lifted exposure a touch, crushed the highlights -100, lifted shadow +100, added clarity +25, vibrance +15, sharpened image by 50%, reduced noise by similar values, removed chromatic aberration. The clever bit was I drew a mask on the dead tree trunk as it was too dark and I wanted that twisted texture to come out. Within the mask I lifted exposure, clarity, sharpness, contrast and warmed up the white balance to match the sunset and recover that texture.

Some people will think this is over the top and not natural. I contend that it's simply correcting the scene to what my eyes actually saw and the vision I had while composing the image. I might revisit this one day as I think I can do a better job on it.

I hope this helps

[Tortoise]

Yes, thanks! Never come across airglow before - is it only green with time lapse?

[stepbystep]

Yes, thanks! Never come across airglow before - is it only green with time lapse?

So far as I know. Wikipedia knows more
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airglow