Even the most expensive camera in the world can't create an image as high of resolution in a single shot. Here's how I assembled my latest work, The Eye.
The first step to creating a highly detailed image is using a really zoomed in lens. I used Sony's 50mm f/1.2 lens and created a panorama of the sky in 15 shots (5 shots wide, 3 rows).
15 shot panorama for the sky taken on my star tracker.
My first attempt at this was actually a huge waste of time... I wanted a ton of exposure time so I shot each panel for 4.5 minutes, resulting in over an hour of shooting. When I checked my camera after it was finished, there was a thin layer of cloud covering almost every frame, rendering it unusable ๐ฅฒ. Luck was on my side, though, as the clouds seemed to vanish right as I finished my first attempt - so I set my panorama up once again, this time settling for just 60s per panel out of fear of more clouds coming in.
โ Next, I had to capture the foreground in a similar manner:
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All the while, my second camera was capturing a timelapse of that whole field of view in hopes of catching as many meteors as possible.
Back at home, I started processing by assembling the pieces of the panoramas in a program called PTGui. It stitches together each panel as seamlessly as possible. Then, I proceeded to combine the sky and foreground panoramas. The reason these were shot separately is that the sky was shot on a star tracker which allowed me to get long exposures of the stars at the expense of the ground's sharpness. Shooting them separately allows me to use separate settings that are better for each element.
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Then comes the monotonous part... I had to manually survey over 3,000 images from the meteor camera to search for meteors. After countless hours of searching, I had about 90 meteors that were big enough to use and happened to fall in frame for the main composition (since I shot the meteors with just an approximation of where my final shot would be looking in the sky, some happened to fall out of frame). โ Each meteor was then painstakingly inserted to the main composition by aligning the stars...
For me, authenticity was a crucial component. Sure, I could have saved myself days of work by randomly inserting the meteors however I pleased... but that would not feel right to me. Instead, the finished piece features an accurate representation of how the Perseid meteor shower would have happened if you could freeze earth's rotation and all the meteors fell in one moment. That's the best possible way to represent the shower in a single image. Due to the technique used, this image ended up being 256 megapixels in size! For reference, that's 21 times larger than your standard iPhone photo ๐ .
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That's all for now, friends! Be sure to click the button below if you'd like to download the free wallpaper or buy a print.
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