• April 16, 2023, 6:20 a.m.

    N23_0554.JPG

    Welche to the smalles red Light District in town.
    Witch bullet to bitte for more sharpness?

    • Move further away to use hyperfocal distance, making target smaller.
    • Raise F-number, raising ISO too.
    • Raise F-number and time, bringst out startrails.
    N23_0554.JPG

    JPG, 664.7 KB, uploaded by 43review on April 16, 2023.

  • Members 1383 posts
    April 16, 2023, 10:07 p.m.

    It is a devil's bargain. Unless you actually want star trails, Door #3 is off the table. (I don't like star trails for reasons I cannot explain, so I'm biased). Since my camera is m43, I'd pass on Door #2 as well, but if you use a camera that breezes through high ISO #s with negligible noise, that would be a good option. In my world, Door #1 is the only one I could go through safely. With this scene it would work unless the surroundings just outside the current frame boundary are hideous and impossibly distracting.

    I do not actually know what I'm looking at here but I'm guessing it is one of those individual cabana things you see on European beaches. But it could be a portable toilet or an off season ice fishing hut. The smallest red light district is as good a name as any. It's true purpose seems less important than its form and color. It is red, it is a partially veiled light source, and it has painted the sand or dirt red all around. It seems the redness is the subject, and carries the viewer's eye from the left edge of the frame to the Structure, up to the brightest light, and then we find the stars.

    It would be worth considering a crop on the right side to take the structure out of dead center, or to shoot for that variation, so see how it might look. I'm not sure there is much in the rightmost 1/4 of the frame that is contributing interest.

    All in all it is an interesting, somewhat puzzling and whimsical shot that makes you want to figure out more, and that's success. And if you ever figure out which bullet bites best, let us know. That is the biggest quandary of photography for me.

  • Members 53 posts
    April 17, 2023, 1:13 a.m.

    Another idea not mentioned by minniev: Try multiple exposures, one for the foreground and another one for the stars. Then combine them in post. That way you can obtain the optimum exposure and sharpness for each. I've never tried it personally, but I've read a lot of info online about how to do this.

  • Members 7 posts
    April 22, 2023, 1:09 a.m.

    I too would stack the images to avoid star trails - they are distracting. A $400 star adventurer ri will track the earth's rotation and so worth the investment.
    i love the reds against the night sky and the martian like sand, but the hut is too centered and the far right lights take away focus. i'd crop the image and shift the hut to the far right.