I’ve used a variety of different tripod & head combinations over the years, including 3 way geared heads and ballheads. My first geared head was a Manfrotto 410, at the time there was the Manfrottos at the cheap end…

Sometimes you might want to shoot something and get it all in focus but stopping down doesn’t quite get you there, or maybe it does but you don’t want to take the loss in image quality that comes with shooting at f22…

I’ve used a few differnt methods for backus while on the road over the years. I had a D7000 that had dual SD slots, SDs are cheap so the easy solution was to carry a heap of cards. I then upgraded to the D800E and then the D810…

I recently picked up a used D7000, I often need to take photos of my D850 for blog articles and I sold off my D800E and D810. I’ve owned a D7000 in the past, at first I was struggling…

My main tripod is a Gitzo GT3532S, I’ve been using the spiked feet and adding the sand feet to the spikes when I shoot on the beach. I often look in my bag for the sand feet only to find I’ve left them at home or in the car.

The image above was shot over an 11 hour period (some shots at twilight for the foreground and 9.5 hours of star shots once the sky was completely dark), getting a camera to run for this amount of time can be a challenge…

Around 10 years ago an idea popped into my head on how to do something very different with a startrail shoot. It involved zooming in very slowly during the exposure to achieve a spiral shape in the stars…

My bag is the original BC model of the F-Stop Tilopa, there have been a couple of revisions since this one was released. I have the large pro ICU. It’s about as big as you cn go for an airline carry on bag. I can fit the XL Pro ICU…

I recently purchased the Sigma 14-24 F2.8 Art lens, along with a Progrey adapter to mount the G150z onto it. There are some differences between the Sigma and the Nikon setups so rather than add onto my original review I’m doing a separate one for the Sigma…

Running synthetic benchmarks on the 3 different types shows a Sata SSD to be around 5 x faster than a HDD, and an NVME SSD to be around 5x faster than the Sata SSD. I ran some image stacking tests in PS…

Here’s my ten favorite shots of 2019, most are from a trip around the south island of New Zealand, along with a few from Victoria, Australia. There’s still time left for a few more shoots so there’s a slight chance it could change before the end of the year…

I also use this for gaming so there’s some things that you wouldn’t use in a Photoshop only build - such as the custom watercooling loop, high end GPU and soundcard. I built this before the latest generation of processors was released, so the CPU and motherboard are last gen...

With IOS13/iPadOS there is support for external storage devices and a file manager app, and the lightning port has been replaced by a USB-C port which can power external drives and other accessories. I always have 2 cards in the D850, an XQD and an SD, both 64gb running in backup mode…

When I’m setting up my shots I normally just pull out my phone and fire up the Photopills augmented reality mode to locate the southern celestial pole. Every now and then I forget to charge my phone or leave it in the car and have to fall back on the old school method…

Startrail images can be shot with either a single long exposure or by stacking multiple shorter exposures. The two methods can give very different results, and each method has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. One of the biggest…

When using a Wacom tablet with Photoshop on Windows 10 the default behavior is to use Windows Ink. Unfortunately this causes problems in Photoshop, disabling Windows Ink fixes the problems but you will also lose the pressure sensitivity function on your tablet. The pressure sensitivity…

I recently picked up a pair of Samyang 14mm f2.8 lenses for shooting startrails on my older cameras. The quality control on these isn’t great, but if you manage to get a good copy it’s performs well for astro. One thing I noticed on both of the Samyangs was the position of the focus ring was way off…

When I first tried to use the built in intervalometer in my D7000, I found the interface hard to understand and the documentation in the manual was severely lacking. Things have improved over time, but there’s still some important factors to how things work that is left out of the manuals.