Lupine Nights

Some clear night in NH's White Mountains inspired me to try my hand a night photography.  Moving flowers made for a challenging time.  This was the first time I have ever composited a sky into a foreground, and found the process tedious and technically troubling.  Cutting and pasting a sky must be easy for some, but I'm sure I am going about it the wrong way.  The flowers and tree line were taken 1/2 hour after sunset so blending with the sky might be easier as the lighting would be similar. 5 images for focal stacked at f11, ISO 1000, 1/4 sec. to try and get sharp flowers in the breeze.  I left the camera set up and came back at midnight to shoot the sky.  I took a number of exposures at various ISO and between 20-30 sec. exposures.  I ended up using the exposure of 20 sec. at ISO 6400, f2.8.  I manually blended the sky into the FG focal stacked image.  I tried making some single shot images at f2.8 but was having difficulty with focusing, even when setting focus to infinity, which seemed to be a range on my Tamron lens.   Really didn't get the sharpness I wanted, so I tried a shot at f8 which turned out better.

I like night images to look like night or maybe twilight with a lot more stars, so that was what I was after in the processing.  Much easier to darken things than brighten and introduce noise.

D810, Tamron 15-30  f2.8