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Show and Tell: Fog on Mountain Fork

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My birthday gift from Mother Nature came a couple days early in 2019 as I awoke to the sight of dense fog outside my hotel room in Hochatown, Oklahoma. Wake up call came well before dawn, and only the lights of the parking lot outside gave any indication to the heavy blanket of fog outside the hotel room door. In an instant my original plans for a vivid sunrise vanished, replaced instead with new ideas and new locations that I had scouted on previous visits to the area. Grabbing our …

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Show and Tell – Barn Burner Vertical

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As they say, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” – as so was the 2018 Fall trip to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. And that enemy in our case was Hurricane Micheal. It’s path up the east coast put it squarely over where my shooting partner and I were planning to be. So a detour into Kentucky was quickly planned on the fly so we would be on the outer edges of it’s influence instead of sitting right under it in a downpour for 2 days. …

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Show and Tell: Old Rock Eclipse

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St. Olaf’s Kirke, also known as the Old Rock Church in Cranfils Gap, Texas was built in 1886 by Norwegian settlers in the area. Since those days it has become known as one of the most haunted places in the Lone Star State. This reputation however has not kept it from becoming a well known and often visited astrophotography location by area night sky photographers who contact the care takers for permission to shoot on its grounds after dark. As was the case when a friend and fellow photographer friend …

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Show and Tell: Red Rock Milky Way

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I’m about to break a few hearts, but hopefully also blow a couple minds. This is a composite. Not only is it a composite, the foreground was taken at 5pm, not 5am as it might look. Taking an image that I shot on my way out to Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada on my last day of my 2018 Death Valley trip, and pairing it with a Milky Way exposure I took previously on the trip without a good foreground, I took the best of two photos and …

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Show and Tell: Trails on the Prairie

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Seeing as one of my most popular articles here in the Learning Center is my ‘Stacking Star Trails in Photoshop CC’ – decided to share this non-stacked single frame star trail to show what can be done with a single exposure – as well as the challenges in capturing them. Where most star trails are shot at around 30-60 seconds per shot and then stacked with either Photoshop of another specialized application such as StarStax, this photo was taken in a single 2100 second exposure… doing the math, that’s 35 …

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Show and Tell: Possum Kingdom Invasion

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“If there’s one thing I know, it’s never to mess with mother nature, mother in-laws and, mother freaking Ukrainians.” – Skinny Pete Storm Chasing – it has become extremely popular in recent years, however it’s also very dangerous, not only to you, but others on the roads as well. Mother Nature is not to be taken lightly when she’s full of anger and fury. For this single reason, I choose not to chase on my own, but instead have formed friendships with a couple of experienced chasers whom I trust. …

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Show and Tell – Artists Palette, Death Valley

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The for my first major trip of 2018, I set my sights on Death Valley National Park. One of the few places with a good chance of being ‘camping weather’ at the end of February, and a location I had wanted to shoot for some time. Clear skies during the day and partially cloudy skies at night frustrated me much of the time. While the weather wasn’t as cooperative as one might hope, I can’t complain too much either as I think the warmest we ever saw was in the …

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Show and Tell – Dallas Arts in the Rain

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What do most people do when it’s a cold and wet night a few days before Christmas? Well, if they have finished their Christmas shopping, and they have any sense at all, they’re home by the fire. What do Photographers do? Well they drive downtown looking for reflections to shoot. And that’s exactly how I found myself with another photographer friend outside the Windspear Opera House in the Dallas Arts District in late 2017. We got chased under cover a couple times by stronger downpours of rain, but in between, …

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Show and Tell – Railcar Milky Way

In Astrophotography, Learning Center, Show and Tell by jfischer1 Comment

When a good friend on Instagram messaged me about a group planning a trip to Galveston for an all-out blitz of a weekend with little sleep, little in the way of plans other than astrophotography and the beach, I wasn’t about to pass up the invite. What I didn’t plan on was hitting north Houston traffic at 5pm on a Friday afternoon. Needless to say, by the time I crossed over the bridge onto Galveston Island, I needed a beer more than I needed to shoot a marginally interesting sunset. …

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Show and Tell: Ketetahi Falls

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Tongariro National Park, home to the major volcanoes of New Zealand’s North Island. And where there are mountains, there will be streams of water flowing down from the high elevations, and where there is flowing water, with a little luck there will be a waterfall or two. Ketetahi Falls is one of the smallest named falls within the National Park, but that makes it no less picturesque and worth a visit. Located at the end of the popular Alpine Crossing hiking trail, most hikers pass it right by in the …

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Astrophotography Lenses – Beyond the f-number

In Astrophotography, General - Tips and Tricks, Learning Center by jfischer4 Comments

Just getting started in Astrophotography?  Please check out my introductory article, ‘Astrophography – Seeing the Light in the Darkest Places’ first before you dive in here.  It’s been recently updated for 2017! Astrophotography is a wonderful, and at the moment wildly popular, style of photography. From the peace that comes from sitting in the still darkness taking in the sights of the night sky, to the wonder of seeing far more than the eye can behold light up the back side of your camera’s screen after each click – there …

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Show & Tell: Downpour

In Learning Center, Show and Tell by jfischer1 Comment

Leaving Dallas on a Sunday evening, pointing my truck to the western sky I headed out to Montague for what was planned to be an astrophotography shoot.  The skies were clear, the winds were light, nearly ideal weather for shooting the night sky.  However once I passed through Denton and left the DFW metroplex a light gray shadow appeared on the horizon. By the time I was approaching Montague the gray shadow was now an ominous monster of a storm. The original plan was to meet up with a few …