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Star Trails
These examples show performance at night with star trails.
The stars on this night at 9500 feet elevation in the California Sierra Nevada were better than the average night, which is to say much inferior to the best nights I have seen in a decade of trips: those really outstanding nights are quite rare as a rule. Here, the sky has significant background glow, reducing the contrast of the stars and making the Milky Way only moderately visible, and the eye can clearly see this difference as compared to those rare and spectacular primordial nights I have occassionally experience.
Focusing
Focusing is necessarily difficult at night; in Live View the image is almost entirely constant noise even at f/1.4 unless one is so fortunate to have an exceptionally clear and high contrast sky to work with (not here).
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Diglloyd DAP is DSLR-oriented, but also contains workflow and other topics. Much of the focus is on Canon and Nikon but also Pentax and Pentax medium format.
Special emphasis is placed on lens evaluation, focusing on Canon and Nikon and Sigma lenses, but with a few others like Rokinon/Samyang.
- Make better images by learning how to get the best results right away.
- Save money by choosing the right lens for your needs the first time, particularly some of the new Sigma Art lenses vs Nikon and Canon.
- Workflow discusses image organization, raw conversion and post processing. Many examples show processing parameters for direct insight into how the image was converted.
- Jaw-dropping image quality found nowhere else utilizing Retina-grade images up to full camera resolution, plus large crops [past 2 years or so].
- Real world examples with insights found nowhere else. Make sharper images just by understanding lens behavior you won’t read about elsewhere.
- Aperture series from wide open through stopped down, showing the full range of lens performance and bokeh.
- Optical quality analysis of field curvature, focus shift, sharpness, flare, distortion, and performance in the field.
Want a preview? Click on any page below to see an excerpt as well as extensive blog coverage, for example on Nikon or on Canon or on Pentax.
Nikon D800E + 58mm f/1.4G