/photography

tools for me making photographs

Primary LanguageShell

This repository contains tools for making time lapse/stacked photos. I mostly use these to produce images from long exposure night time star captures.

Tools:

  • ImageMagick
  • Enfuse Enblend
  • Hugin

References:

Workflow:

I use either a remote shutter control, or I use Av mode on a Canon 80D camera. My lenses:

  • 8mm Altura f/3.0
  • 10-22mm Canon EF-S f/3.5

The settings that matter most:

  • Av Mode
  • manual focus, use Live View to pixel peep and verify Hyperfocal length setting and then switch to MF
  • spot metering (depending on the setting, i frequently have city lights in the frame and they can darken it otherwise)
  • over expose by 2-3 stops
  • auto iso 100-400 or sometimes 800
  • JPG-L output only

I let it take images overnight and then the next morning download them into a directory and use:

  • check for washed out images, usually after dawn it starts to wash out due to direct sun, I delete these
  • remove any images where the cloud cover is too much/foggy
  • check for blurry images due to fog/rain
  • look at first few images to make sure any test images aren't in the batch
  • run star_trails.sh
  • checkout all_combined* for total star trail output
  • if desired pair down the combined_* images to have fewer images based on the desire trail output

Output Artifacts:

  • all_combined_: a combination of all the IMG_ images with the brightest pixels from each
  • combined_: takes ten IMG_ images and makes them into one image with the brightest pixels from each
  • trail_: same as above but uses the 'trailing' ten images to create moving trails in the trail_ movies
  • random_: takes random images from combined and trail to produce interesting morse code star trails
  • movies/: creates animations from serializing each image into a movie

Open Issues:

  • lots of online research seems to indicate that RAW/CR2 images are better for night photography, these don't work well with the tools in these scripts and are huge
  • figure out how to get it to over-expose at night but not the next morning for stars and sunrise

Research: