It’s bigger and costlier than last year’s Pixel 4A, but Google’s mid-priced Android phone remains the best option for almost everyone.
Astrophotography
How to Blend the Night Sky and Foreground in Photoshop
A nighttime landscape shot with the Milky Way over the earth below can be dramatic and eye-catching, but they almost always require two separate exposures for the foreground and the sky to get the best image quality. Once you have your two images, you will need to blend them to create a single final frame, and this great video tutorial will show you how to do it using Photoshop.
A Review of the Sony FE 35mm f/1.4 GM Lens
Few focal lengths are more versatile than 35mm, being wide enough to tackle things like events coverage, landscapes, and astrophotography, but not so wide that things like portraits are not reasonable. Sony shooters have a premium option in the FE 35mm f/1.4 GM lens, and this awesome video review takes a look at the sort of performance and image quality you can expect from it in practice.
How To Take Stunning Night Photos
Night photography can be technically daunting. Even with modern cameras, it’s not easy to capture high-quality night photos. While photographing the stars already requires high ISOs combined with wide apertures, capturing details in the landscape is even more difficult in the dark. In this article, I walk you through my night photography workflow, which combines image averaging with time blending and focus stacking to achieve high-quality results.
A Review of the Samyang AF 24mm f/1.8 FE Lens
A wide-aperture 24mm lens is one of the most useful primes you can carry in your bag, offering a wide but not too wide focal length that can work in a variety of scenarios. The Samyang AF 24mm f/1.8 FE offers great image quality at an affordable price, and this great video review takes a look at the performance and image quality you can expect from it.
A Low-Cost Path to Astrophotography
I’m occasionally asked to recommend a camera to get into astrophotography. Of course, my first answer is to use the camera and lenses you already have. Beyond that, it’s difficult to recommend a specific brand and model because I don’t have every camera at my disposal, and we are blessed (cursed?) with a continuous stream of new and improved cameras. Here are some thoughts.
How Astrophotographers Shoot (Very) Long Exposures
If you’ve viewed deep-sky astrophotos (not landscape astrophotos), you may have noticed that extremely long exposures (not counting mosaics) are used. In extreme cases, exposures may run over 12 hours. Unless you have a space telescope, it should be obvious that multiple exposures have been used.
