Written and Photographed by Nicolas Tabbush

Artist

My name is Nicolas Tabbush. I'm a full-time musician and passionate photographer, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I'm a permanent violinist of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra.

My love for photography and astronomy came to my life roughly at the same time, when I was very young, so quite soon I learned that I could attach my film camera onto a basic telescope that I had. I captured, then, my first Astro images, and astrophotography captured me forever!

I basically do two different types of astrophotography: Deep Sky, and Wide Field Astrophotography. Deep Sky involves attaching the camera body to a telescope to take close up images of small and distant objects in the sky, whereas Wide Field Astrophotography uses the camera lens to cover a wider field of view.

Although astrophotography is my main field of interest, I also do landscape and portrait photography. For more of my work, you can check out my Instagram or Flickr!

The Concept

The world has slowed down for some time. We need to take a moment to rethink so many things. In Latin the prefix "RE" means "back" or "again". And "FLEX" means "to bend" or "to fold". Reflex is, then to be bent back. It may refer to a bouncing object, to light rays or even to thinking, as we bring our thoughts back and forth when we reanalyze our ideas. In this composited image of an Astro reflection, I wanted to depict how we may be feeling about the current worldwide situation and our need to reflect on certain concepts.

About the Shot

Whenever we aim our camera to the night sky we face two major obstacles: 1) the light reaching us from the stars is very dim, so we need to take long exposures, but... 2) The earth is spinning! So if we take really long exposures, beyond certain limits, the stars begin to trail and will show as little lines instead of pinpoint stars.

One common solution to that is to increase the ISO value and keep our exposure relatively short. Besides, we typically take multiple exposures, and later stack them in post-processing, since image stacking will significantly reduce random noise. Both methods can be used in combination, so we can take a lot of relatively short exposures (to avoid trailing) at a high ISO. This technique usually works fine for wide-angle lenses. But with longer focal lengths it's not really helpful since using longer lenses will limit the maximum exposure we can take before we start to see the stars trail.

This is when the use of a star tracker is most welcome! A star tracker is a motorized device that compensates for the earth's rotation. It allows you to lower the ISO and extend the exposure by keeping your camera fixed on the stars.

So far, everything is working perfectly fine. Our camera is tracking the stars and motion blur is avoided. But this brings another issue if we want to include landscape features to complete our composition. As the camera moves slowly on its tracker, now the landscape is blurred! I decided to shoot the landscape and sky separately, and later combine them in post-processing to create the final image!

Processing this photo was quite challenging, especially because of the refined masking needed, to reveal the thin tree branches. The image was shot outside Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Technical Information

Camera: Nikon D810

Image: Tracked / Stacked / Blended

Foreground: Single exposure. Samyang 14mm  f/8.  ISO 200. 1/125 during blue hour.

Milkyway Sky: Sigma Art 50mm f/1.4  @f/4.   ISO 800.   17 x 5 minute shots stacked. Total exposure is 1 hour 25 min. Star Adventurer tracker.

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