Mermaid Reef: Sony a7sii + Stack, Blend, and Composite
Written and Photographed by Pedro Martínez of Arte Nocturno
Artist
My name is Pedro Martínez of Arte Nocturno. I live in Spain, I am a videographer and also teach amateurs this wonderful world of astrophotography.
Photography and astronomy have always accompanied me, so one day these hobbies merged. Although it was not until my first visit to an astronomical observatory that I took it seriously, there I exchanged knowledge with astronomers and offered my collaboration to improve their studies.
I specialize in the capture of the Milky Way and its subsequent processing. I am researching new techniques for processing these images to teach future astrophotographers. To see more of my work, check out my Instagram and Website! Here I upload additional content to teach photographers the wonders of the nocturnal art of the night sky!
Photo
This photo is composed of two images in two different places.
The foreground: This photo is taken in Arrecife de las Sirenas, Almería (Spain) with a simple 61 seconds exposure, at ISO 5000. At 4 am in the place of the shot you can't see anything, it's all black, now you understand why these settings are so overstated. The lens used was a 14mm wide-angle at F2.8 to be able to capture a large field of vision in wide-angle.
The sky: Although it would have been possible to do the capture in the same place of the reef the decision was to take the picture another day and in a higher place to achieve more contrast in the horizon, specifically at almost 3000 meters high. This place is Sierra Nevada, in Granada (Spain). This is where my motorized mounted sky tracking telescope came in handy. I put the camera with an 85mm lens to F1.4 in the telescope (piggyback) and parked the mount as accurately as possible, although it was not easy because of the strong wind of the place. It took up to 4 hours to get the 17 sharp pictures as a puzzle, to achieve a wider field of vision using such a deep lens. This was on June 2nd between 1am and 5am. It was very cold, which made the session even more difficult.
The exposure time was 60" seconds in each shot and ISO 400 to have the least noise possible. It's wonderful to see the result without developing on the camera screen. Which, by the way, is the Sony a7sII. Also used in the foreground, it is a camera that can reach 409,600 ISO so the ISOs used are very bearable for this camera. No need to pile up to reduce noise, the shots were very clean, even at ISO 400.
Editing Process
The editing post-processing was also a complex task, I had to choose the cleanest shots, I almost filled a 32Gb SD card because of the wind, and I was also developing new processing techniques.
First the development in Camera RAW, then the combination of the whole puzzle, and finally the processing by layers, in this last part there are many steps and tricks to obtain that depth and color. My style is based on achieving the highest possible quality in the nebulae, attenuating the brightness of the stars. In this way, we can obtain more volume in the Milky Way.
I only use Photoshop, without plugins, I have developed a unique workflow that I now teach in my courses to amateur astrophotography. More Information about these materials can be found here!
Technical Information
Camera: Sony a7sII
Lens: Samyang 14mm and 85mm
Telescope: Skywatcher N 200/1000 (for guidance)
Mount: Celestron AVX Advanced
Image: Tracked, composite, pano
Get Featured
Interested in sharing your story? Apply to have your work featured with your portfolio and a brief introduction via our Be a Contributor page. We'll look out for your email!
If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out our YouTube Channel for tutorials, cinematic edits, and client projects!