Ring of Fire (Eclipse) from Valley of Fire

ksproul

Here's a bit of background on this one, if you care...

Two weeks ago today, I left for a long weekend in Las Vegas. After planning the whole trip, I found out about the annular eclipse that would be taking place exactly when I would be flying back home to Washington state. I had heard nothing about the eclipse prior to planning my trip. I decided that the coincidence of being down there, near the center of the eclipse's path, at the right time was too good to pass up, so I extended my trip by half a day in order to experience (and photograph) the eclipse from there. Our Vegas trip had previously included driving four hours northeast to Bryce Canyon (the previous day) and back (the day of the eclipse), but after returning my wife to the Las Vegas airport and knowing I had to leave early the next morning myself, I wasn't about to drive four hours back to Bryce a second time and then back to Vegas once again. So I decided to shoot the eclipse from Valley of Fire, only about an hour from Las Vegas, and just south of the center of the eclipse's path.

Not having any idea what I was going to do to shoot the eclipse and knowing that I wouldn't have the time to get a solar filter or anything along those lines, I decided to just wing it with my B+W 10-stop ND filter (despite numerous people advising otherwise online). I had taken photos with the sun in it many times before, so I figured some very short exposures through the 10-stop ND filter with direct sun wouldn't hurt anything as long as I avoided live view and looking at the sun myself.

I rushed out to Valley of Fire directly after dropping my wife off at the airport, then hunted for a spot with a decent foreground and a good view of the western horizon. I was running out of time, so I parked my rental car at one of the first decent looking places I could find in the park (a bit south of the Fire Wave area), then walked about a half mile east of the road to an open area to set up my shot. Once I got it framed, I decided to take a few reference shots of the landscape, and then set up for the eclipse exposures. I took a series of nine bracketed (very stopped down) exposures (just to give me more choices when putting it together) every 3 minutes, using my 10-stop ND filter. Toward the end, I made sure to grab a few normal sunset exposures as well. All in all, I took nearly 400 photos over the two and a half hours I stood out there.

After surveying what I had captured just a couple days ago, I decided to put together a composite from a normal starting exposure, a normal sunset exposure, and stopped down eclipse exposures at six-minute intervals. This is the result. I'm very open to any comments and/or criticism on this. I've never done anything quite like this before, and I had to use a bit more artistic license than I'm accustomed to when editing, so I'll take all the feedback I can get, especially if anyone has any ideas to improve it. Thanks!

JC

That looks great! My only suggestion would be to give up getting both the sunset star, and the foreground exposure together. Your mask around the sun star is pretty obvious. I'd put in a much wider gradient mask around the sun if you want to keep the star. Or a heck of a lot of pixel by pixel masking to get rid of the circle of mask around the setting sun. You could also spend some more time on the rim working on the black edge. Did you try screening the layers together? That might help.

ksproul

kolibri wrote: »

That looks great! My only suggestion would be to give up getting both the sunset star, and the foreground exposure together. Your mask around the sun star is pretty obvious. I'd put in a much wider gradient mask around the sun if you want to keep the star. Or a heck of a lot of pixel by pixel masking to get rid of the circle of mask around the setting sun. You could also spend some more time on the rim working on the black edge. Did you try screening the layers together? That might help.

Thanks for the suggestions. I did have some trouble blending the layers together. The background and foreground (all the non-eclipse stuff) is composed of three different shots: one for the pre-eclipse sky, one for the sunset (mostly post-eclipse) sky, and one for the foreground. Masking the two sky shots together was easy, as I just used a simple gradient from the top to the bottom of the sky portion. Masking together the sunset and foreground exposures was a lot more work. I did purposely leave the top of the foreground a bit dark so I could keep the sunset star over part of it, but I don't think the mask is as obvious as it might look (at least I hope not). Believe it or not, there was actually a dark "indent" in the rocks right where the sunset came down. Check out this unedited (other than a quick resize and sharpen) exposure, which is the one I used for most of the foreground (with my high-tech shade covering the sun for improved contrast):



You can see the dark indent that's coincidentally exactly where the sunset star ended up. So it kind of worked in my favor in that I was able to keep that area a bit darker, but I suppose that without knowing the indented area is natural, it might look like a poorly done mask.

I did not try screening the layers together for any of the background/foreground blend, although I did for inserting the eclipse shots onto the final backdrop. That's something I might have to play around with some more.

Anyway, I'd be curious to know if the above shot changes your opinion about the masking in the area of the sun star or if you think it could still use more work. I'd like to get this done as well as I can, so I really appreciate the feedback. Thanks!

JC

ksproul wrote: »

You can see the dark indent that's coincidentally exactly where the sunset star ended up. So it kind of worked in my favor in that I was able to keep that area a bit darker, but I suppose that without knowing the indented area is natural, it might look like a poorly done mask.


Anyway, I'd be curious to know if the above shot changes your opinion about the masking in the area of the sun star or if you think it could still use more work. I'd like to get this done as well as I can, so I really appreciate the feedback. Thanks!

I did look at the image for quite a while trying to figure out if that dark ring was a natural shadow or a mask before I posted the first time. I think the problem is, unless you want to display the single image next to the compilation, no matter how natural that shadow is, it's going to look like a mask effect. But if it's reality, it's reality. I was just reading a Galen Rowell story about in the early days of his digital printing he offered to show his original transparencies to skeptical print buyers who thought his images might be the product of manipulation.

The dark blending rim on the top of the cliff isn't as obvious now that I look at it on my desktop monitor, my laptop has a really high contrast screen, but it still looks slightly unnatural.

Overall it's a great shot/compilation.

ksproul

Thanks for your feedback! I played around with the layers some more and redid things a bit. Using screen mode to blend the sunset layer with the foreground layer instantly allowed me to keep the entire sunset star over the foreground, so thanks a ton for that suggestion. It also allowed me to make a cleaner break between those two layers elsewhere, and along with a little manual cleanup, I was able to blend the layers without having to darken the top of the foreground layer along the rim. Overall, I'm much happier with it. What do you think?

spacefuzz

ksproul wrote: »

Thanks for your feedback! I played around with the layers some more and redid things a bit. Using screen mode to blend the sunset layer with the foreground layer instantly allowed me to keep the entire sunset star over the foreground, so thanks a ton for that suggestion. It also allowed me to make a cleaner break between those two layers elsewhere, and along with a little manual cleanup, I was able to blend the layers without having to darken the top of the foreground layer along the rim. Overall, I'm much happier with it. What do you think?

I think your re-edit is much nicer. Glad you extended your trip for the eclipse.