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.

I first tried this concept very adjusting the zoom ring by hand in very small increments…

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 but the large leaves me enough room at the top to put a decent jacket in there if needed….

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 to see if the synthetic benchmark results translate into real-world performance gains…

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With IOS13/iPadOS there is support for external storage devices and a file manager app, and the lightning port has been replaced by a USB-C port which can power external drives and other accessories.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.

This post will cover the steps for setting up the D850 for the automated Holy Grail timelapse technique using qDslrDashboard/ControlMyCamera app on an IOS device with a direct Wi-Fi connection between the app and the iphone/ipad (no Snapbridge app).

For one startrail shoot on my D810 the mechanical shutter goes up and down between 600 and 1000 times. The D850 can do the same amount of images with only one actuation of the mechanical shutter, which occurs when it flips the mirror up to enter Live View mode….

Progrey recently released another holder, the G150Z, which looks similar to the G150X but there are some significant design changes compared to the old holder.

The G150Z is available to suit the Nikkor 14-24, Canon TS-E17, Zeiss 15mm, Tamron 15-30....

Comparing the Lee and Progrey 0.9 soft grads, the Progrey has a slightly softer transition than the Lee. Color balance looks slightly different when holding them side by side, the lee has a slight purplish tinge when held next to the progrey.

Here's my ten favorite shots for the year so far (I still have a week to go so it might change). I didn't do a lot of shooting, and what I did do was mainly landscapes & seascapes. Nine of them were from a 2 week trip around Tasmania.

I've been using a modified Lee SW150 filter holder on my Nikkor 14-24, recently I've been having some issues with the threads jumping when screwing the rings onto my lens. I wasn't happy with the response from Lee, and didn't want to buy another SW150 as there are some serious design flaws with the Lee system...

There's nothing worse than shooting for 10 hours and later discovering that the last 8 hours of shots are unuseable because dew has formed on the lens element. There are a number of ways to prevent/reduce dew formation but first we'll look at how to determine if dew formation will be a factor given the current weather conditions...

I've done a post on this before but my loadout has changed quite a bit since then. Recently I've been concentrating more on landscapes than seascapes, and there's a lot more effort involved in getting to the locations, and some different gear required.

I've just finished packing my gear...