Photography by Michael Presley

10/03/2023

What better reason to buy wine? The bottle looks cool! Other 19 crimes I've had were good, we'll know more about that later!

09/18/2023

08/15/2023

Well, another rabbit hole to jump down. Astrophotography has never really interested me much. Last weekend I was out looking for meteors but somehow missed those, I did notice that the Milky Way was very faintly showing itself.

I don't really have the best lens for this type of shooting. I have wide lenses, and I have fast lenses, but I don't have a fast, wide lens. That just means I've got to run the ISO up more than is ideal. There are methods to mitigate the noise that long exposure, high ISO photos suffer from. It's a matter of taking a lot of shots of the subject (called the light frames), taking additional shots with the lens cap on, called dark frames, and at least another set at a high shutter speed called bias frames. With the right software these can be combined to blend the light frames and use the calibration frames (dark and bias) to subtract noise.

Anyway, I took 30 light frames, 30 dark frames, and 30 bias frames and used Affinity Photos astrophotography stacking tool. The end result was a fairly clean but low contrast view of the sky.

I shot with a fisheye lens and was shooting 15 second frames, f/4 and ISO 6400.

So the next big thing is to figure out how to edit the shot to get the contrast and whatever colors that might be buried in the shot to pop out.

Editing was done in ON1 Photo RAW to add contrast, push the colors around, and judiocus use of the curves tool to finally get the Milky Way to pop.

Still learning.

07/24/2023

Out on the town this afternoon, experimenting with long exposure, over exposed, intentional camera movement.

07/17/2023

A pre-teen shoot, what could be more fun! It took a little while for them to loosen up and have some fun.

06/24/2023

I used one of these lenses a few years ago and got many great results with it. Sadly I sold it to finance other things I wanted, and always regreted selling it. Found one in pristine condition in the original box for 1/3 the price of new so I got it. I forgot how heavy it is, 1.25 pounds of steel and glass! Isn't she beautiful!

The Voightlander 42.5mm f/.9

06/16/2023

Sometimes, what is considered a flaw in the performance of a lens can be used to good creative advantage. Caleb and his trumpet, shot with an older Vivitar 135mm f/2.5. It obviously flares with too much direct light but I think it works here!

06/13/2023

06/11/2023

The chaperone