Zion National park --- Dark Skies, friendly squirrels and flowing streams

azfix (65) in photography • 8 years ago (edited)

My interest in photography came after seeing amazing photos of the Milky way by various photographers from around the world. I started learning how to take pictures at night ever so slowly starting with just a black photo of what I thought would be an amazing picture of the celestial bodies above. I soon realized it was more than just pointing the camera in a direction and shooting. Eventually I learned that things like exposure length and aperture are your friends and can help capturing a photo of the milky way. I went to Zion Nation park with the intention of fumbling around in the dark and capturing the Milky way. I was in luck and the first night I took hundreds of shots and ended up with a couple decent ones. One of my favorites was the above capture of the Milky way between two mountains in Zion park.

I was pretty happy and decided to see how things looked during the day and was able to capture quite a few nice shots of the beauty and activities around the National park.

What a great view you get as you enter the visitors center along with quite a few fellow national park enthusiasts planning their course.

Nothing like playing in a stream and quite a few visitors took the time to get their feet wet and experience the water first hand.

A few people actually found some deeper water to swim in, or at least sit down and let the water flow over their body.

Plenty of shade and places to get out of the sun and enjoy the view from the protection of a large tree.

No post would be complete without one of the friendly squirrels that inhabit so many of our National Parks. This squirrel seems to be friendlier than normal and appeared to enjoy having his photo taken.

photography nature travel dark-sky astrophotography

8 years ago by azfix (65)

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playfulfoodie (68) · 8 years ago

How did I miss this post! First time I'm happy about the 7 day payout thing :-)
I would love to visit some of America's national parks some day...

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azfix (65) · 8 years ago

Glad you found it, so much going on lately its easy to miss things. If you ever get a chance to visit them I am sure it will be something you remember always.
Thanks for stopping by! :)

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playfulfoodie (68) · 8 years ago

I think so too! I would be very happy to visit the US, because it all looks so big, especially compared to the Netherlands where everywhere you look are people. I'd love to take a long trip there some day, once I have the funds for it :D

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azfix (65) · 8 years ago

We sure do have tons of open spaces, especially in the National Parks and desert locations. The more time you have the better, I live here and I could spend a lifetime seeing everything.

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betelzeus (56) · 8 years ago

So ... first on the National Park shots ... very nice ... the 5th image down(deeper water for people to swim) and the second from the bottom are my second favorites , but i think the squirrel has to take first place on that one :)

Anyway , the Milky Way shot ... very nice .. I like the set up especially , with the cliff faces on the sides and the Milky Way going across. And it's cool that you can see the dark lanes. Now with that said , I hate to be critical of other people's stuff , it's quite difficult for me. Being critical of my own stuff , yeah pretty easy , other's people stuff .. not so much. And I'm no expert on ... much of anything , I'm just a dude trying to learn what I can. Now with that out of the way , it might just be a little noisy in there (High ISO maybe?) And are you taking RAW or JPEGs? What settings did you use for that image if you don't mind me asking?
Overall though , it is pretty cool , i do like that shot.

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azfix (65) · 8 years ago (edited)

I appreciate you stopping by and taking a look , your comments let me know that you have some experience taking photos at night. Spot on with the iso comment, it was about 10000 I have learned not to go above 3200 for the most part with my current photos. You are also right about the jpeg not to mention image resize for the web, I shoot in raw and jpeg simultaneously now. Exposure was probably longer than it needed to be , running about the max of 30 seconds to avoid star trails. Knowing what I know now, I am certain if I go back to that location I could get something I would be more pleased with. I am constantly learning and appreciate all the feedback I can get.
Thanks again for stopping by and having a look! :)

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betelzeus (56) · 8 years ago

Any plans on visiting there again? I'd been keen to see you do some more Milky Way shots from there.

There was a page for ISO efficiency that I looked at a while back , i think it's geared mostly toward astrophotography with a telescope , but hey might be useful and is a bit interesting. That can be found here http://dslr-astrophotography.com/iso-dslr-astrophotography/

Also a good article about different types of mounts can be found here
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/MOUNTS.HTM

Or another place to start may be to google 'Barn Door Tracker' which is a DIY solution for tracking the sky , which may be an interesting way to get started tracking the sky. But then again , i guess if you use that you can't really have anything in the foreground when using anything that tracks the sky , unless i guess you want to take multiple pictures and separate the foreground and background and then stack them together.
Anyways (just rambling now haha) , I haven't actually built a barn door tracker myself , because i already had my mount when i found out about them , but it does look like some people out there can get pretty good results with them.

Or then again , maybe just a faster lens , if you're thinking about doing lots of night sky shots. I'm just using the stock 18-55mm which i think is f/3.5-5.6 , but then again i don't use that too much for shots because i use my scopes. A kinda lengthy article can be found here about lenses
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/LENSES.HTM

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azfix (65) · 8 years ago

I probably wont get a chance to go back to Zion for about a year, I have to plan for a new moon and good weather.

Thank you for the info, I am experimenting with a Rokinon 14mm, which is the perfect tool for the job. I just need to work on my composition and work with raw files in Lightroom.
Good article about the Rokinon 14mm here http://www.lonelyspeck.com/rokinon-14mm-f2-8-review/
Its f2.8

I do like that article you linked to about ISO efficiency but I am not sure the mounts or barn door tracker applies to what I am doing. Thanks again for all the info, its nice to have more people around interested in astrophotography.