Hi there Nico Carver here for this five minute friday i'm gonna chat about some of the most
disappointing astrophotography projects the ones that really failed in my eyes for one reason or
another and thinking about this video i started thinking conceptually about sort
of the different stages of an astrophotography project so for me it always starts with the idea
and then i pre-visualize what that idea will look like as a finished photo and then i come
up with a plan for how to capture and process to get me to that final image that i have in my mind
and i realized when thinking about this that you know i'm a pretty okay processor so really most of
my failures don't come in the processing stage but either in that visualization stage where sometimes
my vision is just really out of whack with reality um or sometimes it's a flaw in my actual capture
um be it poor planning or the wrong gear for the job or something else
so let's go through a few examples here and i'll talk through what i think went wrong
what i learned from each failed astrophoto this first one is my most recent failure um
and it really pretty much just came down to poor planning and not enough time to fix my
poor planning because i didn't have another clear night the problem here is the dust and cepheus
should actually somewhat extend down here into this part of the photo and the reason it just cuts
off so abruptly there is because this is a mix of data from different cameras and different lenses
and so the top half has all the data it needs and the bottom half is still missing some data
from an 85 millimeter lens and this is the kind of failure i really don't mind too much because
all it means is i have to wait for my next opportunity to shoot the bottom part of the
photo and then i can finish it and i might even get a chance pretty soon because i'm going out to
the okitex star party in a couple weeks and that's a bortle one zone so fingers crossed i can
finish this project there and it'll look really cool i think when it's all done okay here's a
failure where i had a strong vision which was to show the boston skyline the charles river and the
entire orion constellation um setting over it all in hl for light in in mono and i tested shooting
this a little bit here in somerville but without a good landscape and i thought it looked pretty good
from home sort of but it wasn't perfect but the first night i set up there i realized that my plan
didn't really quite work with the lenses that i was hoping to use um because orion was much higher
than i thought it would be for some reason and so i needed a much bigger sensor or a much wider
lens to capture it all and i was paying by the hour because i was on top of a parking lot and
for integrity sake i was only going to shoot it when orion was actually over the city
so i was short on time which always leads to bad decisions and i decided i'm going to try this
with this samyang 14 millimeter wide lens that you know is pretty good for milky way shooting
but looking at the photos quickly i thought wow yeah this looks good you know the whole field of
view is exactly how i want it when i get home though i realize the stars look like triangles
it looks like there's vaseline on the lens or something and i realized the likely problem
was back focus with filter thickness you can't really use thick narrowband filters effectively
with wide angle lenses without getting tons of distortion unless you are very exacting about the
the back focus and so i still published the photos but acknowledged anyone you know and friends and
things that i didn't think was that great and i might try again with different gear like the
Canon EOS Ra or something like that because i think the problem was just matching the wrong
optics to the camera and filter i was using so i didn't get that kind of sharpness and detail that
i wanted okay if you're still with me this last one is really a problem with pre-visualization
meaning pre-visualization just means imaging um or imagining the photo in your mind's eye
before you take it and what i was imagining was this this would be the fill the entire frame here
with with nebulosity but about 83 hours in you know the the bottom half of the photo is still
not holding up to the top half so it's very top-heavy and so what i ended up doing eventually
is just cutting off the entire bottom half but that means 50 hours of work is gone so
from this failure i learned the best thing with big projects is to continually test bring in
the data into pix insight look at it see how it's going to work before going forward with
this one i just had blind faith that it's gonna work out in the edit i thought yeah it's gonna
it's gonna look cool in the end but it just never did uh sort of meet my expectations for the photo
and so these were some of my astro failures in terms of the creative process of astrophotography
which is something that i felt like covering and hope to do more of because i feel
like it's not talked about enough speaking of that Dylan O'Donnell just released a great video
about the creative aspects of astrophotography about astrophotography styles and processing
styles over on his channel and i really enjoyed that one and and do recommend you check it out
well until next time this has been Nico Carver nebula photos.com clear skies