West Tibet

[NimishC]

awesome pic..did you touch up on the pic in photoshop at any time or this is the original image? How did you do capture it?

[Mellany]

This picture is AMAZING! I too would love to learn how to take a picture like that.

[availablelight]

Thanks NimishC & Mellany for the comments..

There isn't much post-processing done to this, the image came out the camera looking pretty good. I did do some local adjustment to brighten selected areas and a bit of a sat boost to bring out the color contrast in the stars, but not a lot...

The D700 captures incredible detail even at 2500 ISO which is what was required here to keep the shutter speed slow enough to not allow the stars to trail.

A full article on the adventure is here:

http://www.availablelightimages.com/...riting/kailash

Thanks again,

Alister

[availablelight]

Originally Posted by minhthanh77

Really nice set of images you put together in photoshop. IF you go into the channels and click on Blue channel, you notice thin white pixulated lines separating the foreground, mountain and sky. I count three separate images layered together to make one image.

Sorry, we've been through all of this already. This is a single frame taken at 17500 feet in the Himalaya after a 4 day trek across Tibet to get there. Basing a judgement on whether an image is a composite from a single small resized jpeg webpost is useless. I have my credibility intact thank you very much, and perhaps just because you can't see how to do it live in the mountains you can extend your disbelief just long enough to recognize that some of us can.

[availablelight]

Originally Posted by ressalg

For what it's worth:

As an amatuer astronomer and astrophotographer, I can totally appreciate the time and effort that went into this image... especially when you factor in that you were shooting waaaaaaaay up in the mountains.

For those of you who may still have doubts, please keep in mind that this picture was (most likely) taken in a region where there is very little (if any) light pollution to mess things up. We often forget (or ignore?) the fact that, especially from an urban setting, we don't see the night sky as it should be. All the poorly designed streetlights, car dealer lots with super powerful floodlights and even poorly used yard lighting all throw so much light up into the night sky that it's like trying to look at a painting through a white sheet of tissue paper. It's actually kind of sad, really. A recent survey of high school students in the US showed that nearly 80% had never seen the Milky Way. There was a time (probably about 30 or 40 years ago) when you could have stood outside your front door and seen it. I've actually been to a dark site where this picture would be considered a fairly acurate representation of how the sky looks to the naked eye. (Sorry, that kind of turned into an amatuer astronomer / evils of light pollution rant. )

Regardless, great pic Availablelight. I'm totally jealous... of the pic and the place you get to do your shooting.

Thank you, as you can imagine, west tibet is about as far away from urban light sources as you can get without being on a Pole. And at 17500 feet, the atmospheric distortion is also nil. It is a remarkably challenging place to shoot and I had to practice at lower altitudes so I could do it on auto-pilot when I was higher...

Thanks again, I take these enlightened comments to heart... I appreciate it...

Alister