Dreams of Solitude

Sweet take on this great location! I really like the burst of colors above the dark, moody abyss.

Wow, the dark background makes a huge difference. Thanks for linking it. I know this spot well and this is a sweet image from there. Beautifully done.

Floris,
The sky movement along with the star trails makes for a surreal shot. Excellent capture

Very intriguing shot! The sky is wonderful and the stars are a fantastic touch.

Very nice, Floris. I know how much work it took for you to pull this off. The sky is fantastic. If anything, I might prefer just a hint more detail below the tree. Getting the light to not look awfully unnatural in a light-paint/blended exposure like this is tough, but for me, this works.

Thanks Marc! I really appreciated your suggestions when I was working on it at Guy's place too -- definitely helped me in the final processing attempt. Do you mean bring out a little more detail in the sandstone curve, or in bowl itself?

Super, Excellent work
the technique you applied is perfect

A very unusual and original image
Well done.

Geoff.

Maybe a tad more below the tree, in the bowl. I'm in a crappy lighting situation right now though, so maybe a little tough to tell.

Nope. Got back out of the light and it looks just fine now.

haha, thanks Marc. Yea.. these kinds of shots are so sensitive to monitor calibrations, ambient lightening, website backgrounds etc... but you probably know that better than anyone!

Well, you've certainly taken a familiar subject (to those of us on NPN) and put a different spin on it. Beautiful work! I also checked out your blog and I have to say that I might prefer your original post of the "oils" shot to the rework . . . for what it's worth, I also have to add that my favorite overall is the one with the cottonwood leaf that is included on your blog.

Well seen and captured, Floris! This says simplicity and
elegance to me. Glad to see you posting again.

Thanks Phil - I really appreciate the feedback. For the oils shot I was thinking I might go half way between the two. The one with the leaf is my favorite of the two as well.

Hi Floris,
Still wandering at night ah?
Very creative and really amazing execution. This is a beauty from any angle.
Superb!

Oh yeah, I remember this spot
Beautiful presentation and I agree the dark background does make a big difference.

Guy

Beautiful and creates a wonderfull mood, your own take on a recognizable location. I really like the direction of the light rays in contrast to the stars.

Just beautiful Floris.. really nice take on this shot. I love the sky in this shot, and even though I am looking at it on an none calibrated monitor and bad lighting conditions, it still looks great. The darkness adds to the mystery in my opinion.

Neat stuff Floris, the sky is quite other worldly looking.

I dunno Floris. The stars are bugging my eyes out in this one. Perhaps it is the direction of the stars in relation to the direction of the clouds, but it seems somewhat disjointed to me. I almost feel it would have looked much better with either complete trails or no trails at all.

But, everyone else seems to like it, so what do I know. ;]

Nice work with illuminating the inside of that bowl though. Couldn't have been easy to get that right.

I love everything about this image Floris except for the star trails. Their motion, conflicting with the incredible rays from the moonset, creates an uneasiness, and their unnatural appearance interrupts an image that other wise feels very natural, despite a long exposure on the moonset. There's no doubting the originality and skill involved in this image, but the first question I always ask myself when critiquing is whether or not I would hang this on a wall, and then following up with a why or why not.

I don't see as many comments on the flip side on NPN and I thought I might as well add my two cents. I hope it's helpful Floris!

A truly masterful job of vision and execution here! The dark background did indeed make a world of difference. I kinda like the star trails, but could take 'em or leave 'em, as this works well either way.

Thanks folks!

Justin and Nicolaus - I really appreciate the critical feedback. Sometimes I feel I don't see/get enough of it (though there's more on this forum than anywhere else I've seen). In this case star trails were unavoidable given that I wanted the streaking clouds (and thus needed a long enough - 5min at least - exposure to get them). I personally would have liked static stars as well, and I did take some fast exposures, but the cloud forms simply weren't surreal and elegant enough to work with the mood I wanted to create. With a LOT of work I could remove the trails, and replace them with static stars, but I'm against doing such severe alterations to my images (ie. something which is disobeys the laws of physics). In the end, my hope is that the star trails will add to the surreal effect for most people, which they seem to be doing ok.

Since my first introduction of digitally produced/blended static starry twilight landscape images two and half years ago they've become so popular they they've lost much of their charm for me... so I've got to try something new.

Dance Hall Rock, loving this Floris!!

Exquisite! I do recognize this location. I think Guy Tal has posted a composition from here. It seems to me, even considering the impact of the background, that the image on your web site has a bit more punch to it.

Thanks Jim - I was noticing that too. For some reason the one on my website has crisper web sharpening. Not sure how that happened.

So much going on here. It's a fun melange of elements. Is this one exposure?

Psychedelic Soup is really fun. What a great abstract image. A bit too Kuyperish on the colors maybe, but it's the type of image that can handle it

Love it Floris!

Thanks Tony! I detailed it a bit more on my blog, but this is 4 exposures put together. Two for the sky (could just as well have been one exposure), and two for the landscape -- one taken in the early dawn with some light painting accents, and just a little extra light from an exposure taken long before dawn with a spotlight shining on top/back of the tree.

I was thinking of pulling back on the punch in the Soup a little.. we'll see. Sometimes it takes me a few days to really settle in on something. Thanks for the feedback!

Floris, I totally understand where you are coming from on a technical standpoint. What I am wondering..and it's probably pushing the limits quite a bit, is if one took the necessary long exposure of the clouds and moon set, and then went about combining several images in order to accumulate enough for the star trails. Then perhaps finding a way to blend the series together. You could have your semi-long moonlit cloud exposure with the combined star trails overlayed into/onto (via screen blend possibly) it. If you light painted, you could forego the additional photograh/s needed to obtain proper dynamic range in the foreground.

Dunno...it's a thought. And I still firmly believe that we as photographers are only scraping the top of what can be done with nightscapes. There may be more of them out there than a year or two ago, but they are barely a drop in the ocean compared to the tsunami of daylight related photographs. It's good to see you are continuing to try new things. And hell, just because no one has thought of (or officially posted) new and creative ways to take nightscapes does not mean there are none out there.... ;]

Yes, something like that's certainly possible, Nicolaus. The problem is you don't know what the clouds are going to do over a period of 30 minutes, and in many cases you'll lose any structure in the cloud movement and it'll just be a bright blob. I'll probably be trying some stuff like that in the future though, so we'll see what happens.

Awesome Floris. Love the sar trails and yeah, the dark bg put this one over the top. Nice!

To half of the image is well done. The bottom half of the image looks very dark...even when viewed on black background (specially when viewed in ambient light).

The composition and star trials are very well done.

Wonderful once again, Floris. Definitely looks better with the dark background on your website.

A screen blend would only use the brightest portions of the image. I suppose it all depends on when the photograph was taken. Say a 3 - 10 minute shot for the cloud and moon set. Wait a couple of hours for any light to completely bleed out of the sky. Then, if the amount of cloud cover was minimal, several shots over the course of half an hour or so might allow one to get a nice low noise star trail sky to blend into the cloud/moon shot.

Jay - it's dark because it's at night If I make it much brighter it no longer looks natural.

Nicolaus - you could try something like that, but you'd have to then remove all the star trails from the exposure with the clouds (a LOT of work). And then bringing in trails from an exposure where there were no clouds will look odd, as the clouds partially mask the stars. You could fake it a little, but at that point it would start to become a little too much photo art for me. Really the only way to do it naturally would be if you could get lucky and have just the right amount of clouds moving at moonset, and then naturally dissipating to a mostly clear sky. Unlikely... but not impossible.

Ha! I was just in that very spot not three weeks ago.

You did a great job here, I like everything about it except perhaps for the streaked stars, but I know there's little one can do about that.

(BTW, sorry we just missed each other... again. One day we'll finally meet. )

Floris,

It seems I've seen this somewhere before? Kudos though for adding a new twist. The sky is awesome.

I don't think it's been mentioned... but at least for me I feel like I want more sky/stars and less bowl or the other way around. Then again, it's hard to go wrong with such a unique subject, and again you did well to capture and present this in your way.

Lon

I've always been a big fan of your night photography Floris and this image really takes your work to a higher level. I love the clouds which are radiating out from the horizon with the moonlight behind them. The foreground tree and the star trails complete the image. It's amazing how different the image looks on your website compared to NPN. The black background is essential for these night shots.

awesome image, Floris! I do really like this as is. I can't imagine having the forethought to percieve this,and then come up with a way of doing it. For me, if the stars were points of light, that would be amazing. As is, I kind of wish the trails were bigger/longer. But I can see how that wouldn't work with the clouds though too.

Chris

I think it is very nice.

Although personally I don't think developing the web version "best for a relatively dark room" may be the best approach. Although monitors are getting so damn bright these days, maybe it IS the best approach...

Neat! Im not really big on star trails, but it almost works for me here buy giving it the appearance of rain (nice that the streaks are oriented that way)

Very cool...It looks so remote.