My latest YouTube video is another awesome project you can try during the lockdown. Create stunning HDR images of the Moon where you can see the illuminated and the unilluminated side of the Moon in the same photograph. You don’t need a tracking mount or anything fancy, just a camera, telephoto lens and a tripod.
Read MoreIn my latest video I show you how to create stunning star trail images. The tutorial covers gear, settings and even post-processing (although I did save a couple of secret tips for my Patreon supporters).
Read MoreA day doesn’t seem to go by without an image popping up in my social media feed of someone proclaiming proudly that they’ve captured meteors only to be sharing an image of a satellite or a plane trail. It’s an easy mistake to make, even the mainstream media have a habit of using images of satellites and star trails when writing about meteor showers. So rather than simply bursting their bubbles with a brash comment, I thought I’d make this article to help educate others about how to identify what it is you’ve captured.
Read MoreWith many of us stuck in lockdown, quarantine and self-isolation, I thought I’d share 10 ideas for astrophotography that you can do from home, even if you live in a light polluted town or city. If there’s one thing that this pandemic has taught us it’s that we’re all in this together and astrophotography and astronomy only help to solidify that sense of unification. We all live under the same Sun, the same Moon, the same planets and the same stars. People stuck at home all over the world have a chance to photograph the same subjects and share their images with each other. This borderless aspect of astronomy is one of the reasons I love it.
Read MoreSo my “award-winning” film SOLACE is now available on YouTube. It was filmed entirely in my own back garden during the UK Coronavirus lockdown. My aim was to capture and share the solace that I experience whilst out under the stars. People all over the world are going through an incredibly difficult and uncertain time right now and I hope that this film can make you forget everything for just a moment and bring you some peace and solace.
Read MoreLast week I made the long trip from the UK to Chile in the hopes of capturing my first total solar eclipse. I had experienced a cloudy total solar eclipse from the UK in 1999 but back then I was just 9 years old and certainly no photographer. Now that I’m apparently a professional landscape astrophotographer, a total solar eclipse was a gaping hole in my portfolio.
Total solar eclipses are of course a rare event. They occur once every 18 months on average but totality can only be seen from a thin and short path each time. On top of that, there will inevitably be eclipses ruined by bad weather and eclipses that occur in locations difficult to reach, such as the 4 December 2021 eclipse that passes through Antarctica. As such, people who are experienced in photographing total solar eclipses are few and far between and although I have only now captured just one myself, I’d still like to share what I learnt from it.
Read MoreBack in 2017 a friend and I packed our cameras, hired a CampEasy campervan and hit up the classic photography locations of Iceland’s southern coast. From Snaefellsness to Hofn and back to Reykjavik, we slept under the stars and northern lights and woke up next to glaciers, beaches, mountains and volcanoes. We were constantly at the helm of the rugged weather but at one with the landscape and the freedom to relocate was so liberating. It was so good, I wanted to do it again.
Read MoreAs a landscape astrophotographer one of the first things I'll do when using a new camera is to find out the best ISO to use for low-light noise performance. The way to do this is to test the camera at all its ISO settings and find the point at which it begins to display ISO-invariant behaviour (if it even does at all).
Read MoreSigma Imaging UK recently short-loaned me their 14mm f/1.8 Art lens to take out under the dark skies of Wales and see what I thought of it from an astrophotographer's viewpoint. With a night-long forecast for clear skies just before the new moon I headed to the Elan Valley in Mid Wales to test it out.
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