Raya Pro – Real Artists Ship
Skip To Content

Real Artists Ship Photography Blog By Neal Grosskopf

Software: Raya Pro

Neal Grosskopf

Brunette Park – Keweenaw Peninsula, Upper Michigan

Before & After

Here’s a shot I took last August (2019) up in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan at a small park on Lake Superior called Brunette Park. One of my main purposes of this trip was to take night sky photos as it’s a very dark location. I ended up spending two nights out until 2-3am shooting the stars and it was a blast!

Location

As I mentioned before, Brunette Park is located in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan. There’s a road that travels along Lake Superior for a long ways and there’s several small parks you can stop at and enjoy the view. Brunette Park is one of the larger parks up there and faces almost directly south. Many of the other parks are at an angle so they may not work as well for Milky Way photos.

One of my nights at the park there were quite a few people there also looking at the stars. Another large group started a fire in a fire pit, but left at about 11pm. Something to consider if you also visit the park as there may be others there who could get in your photo. The shot here was from my second night at the park where I pretty much had it to myself. The only downside that night was there was some clouds coming in which you can see in my photo.

Composition

I will admit, I’m not original in the composition you see in this post. I had seen it somewhere else online during my scouting and decided to shoot it myself. The shot it taken near the fire pit so if there’s others at the park using it, you won’t be able to take it as they’ll be in your way or the smoke will obscure your view.

This is a good time to call out that it’s very important that you spend some time scouting a location online prior to visiting it, especially if it’s 7 hours away like this was. For instance a lot of the parks up here had trees that would be in way of the Milky Way. A lot of times online, you can find 360 views of parks on Google Maps which helps with determining the spatial layout of a place. I also recommend stopping at places during the day and using Photopills to virtually see where the Milky Way will be later which I did at several of the parks along Lake Superior during the day.

Once I had my composition, I took five images using my Sigma 14mm lens at f1.8. I had accidentally left my camera in crop-mode the entire vacation so this technically is a 21mm shot, doh! I had my Skyguider Pro with me as well, but didn’t use it for this shot as the clouds were rolling in pretty quick and it usually takes me a long time to setup. Also the Milky Way was moving across the sky and by the time I would have had it setup, it probably would have been behind the tree already.

EXIF Information

    Post Processing

    I worked on this photo on and off over the course of 4-5 months. Since having a kid, I haven’t had as much time to both take and post-process photos anymore. The post-processing part is especially difficult as I usually need 4-5 solid hours to edit a Milky Way photo as it involves a lot of masking and small tweaks.

    For this shot, I used Sequator to stack the 5 exposures. Then I imported it to Lightroom and sent it to Photoshop. In Photoshop I made my typical pixel-level edits first like removing star colors, adding an orton effect and star minimization. After that I started creating masks and setup my adjustment layers with levels, curves, white balance etc.

    Software Used

    Lightroom
    Photoshop
    Raya Pro
    Sequator

    Techniques Used

    Exposure Stacking

    Have a Question?

    Neal Grosskopf

    Au Train Falls, Upper Michigan

    Before & After

    This particular shot is one of my favorites I’ve ever taken mostly because of the way the processing of it turned out (I feel it looks most like the photographer’s photos who I admire), but I also think I got the angle/composition of it pretty good.

    Location

    Taken at Au Train Falls in Upper Michigan which are only a short drive from Munising, MI. I was staying up here for a fall colors trip and on my way home stopped at Au Train Falls. The falls have a dam behind them that regulates the amount of water that will be going over the falls so it may vary depending on the time of the year. To access them you pull off on to a gravel and drive a short distance down a hill. It isn’t necessarily a park but you are allowed to visit them. I would recommend bring some rubber boots along if you visit as it opens up the possibilities for different angles of shots you can get if you’re able to walk around in the shallow water.

    Composition

    When I arrived there were a few other people walking around near the falls. Since I had my rubber boots with me, I headed into the shallow water and scouted out compositions. The sun was starting to get low in the sky so I had to find angles where the sun didn’t create too much of a reflection in the water. I had my circular polarizer with me to deal with that as well. The cool thing about Au Train Falls is they are these very long and wide falls and if you moved 5 feet in any direction it totally changes the photo. There’s so many great photos to get here. It’s really one of the most photogenic waterfalls I’ve shot at and I will post a few more photos from the trip here later.

    I took this shot towards the end of my shoot as it was one of the few angles left that the sun wasn’t overpowering. I got down real low and put a couple leaves in front of my lens for a foreground element. Then I turned my camera at an angle to lead the water into the frame. Then, I took 3 bracketed shots at -2ev, 0ev & +2ev. I also took another set like this with the focus set on the foreground so I could focus stack it later.

    EXIF Information

      Post Processing

      As you can see in the before and after, this photo is heavily post-processed. It’s been awhile since I last processed it, but I believe I started in Lightroom, then exported for Aurora HDR. After that brought it back to Lightroom and sent it to Photoshop where I did most of the edits. Then, I wrapped it up in Luminar. I also used Raya Pro to add an orton effect. One of the few things I use Raya Pro for now.

      Software Used

      Aurora HDR
      Lightroom
      Luminar
      Photoshop
      Raya Pro

      Techniques Used

      Focus Stacking
      High-Dynamic-Range

      Have a Question?

      Neal Grosskopf

      The Trona Pinnacles

      Before & After

      While I’m not from California, the Trona Pinnacles seem like a very popular location for night sky photographers in the area. I was lucky to be able to visit them (and the Alabama hills) during my trip out to LA last fall and I’ve finally finished culling and processing my 1,500 photos from the trip. Here’s one of my favorite compositions from that outing.

      Location

      The Trona Pinnacles are located in the middle of nowhere and were a 2-3 hour drive from my hotel at Joshua Tree National Park. I did a day trip up to Alabama Hills the day before and stopped by the Trona Pinnacles during midday to familiarize myself with the area. It was a scorching 100 degrees out in September and there wasn’t any shade to hide from the sun.

      Probably the worst part about visiting the Trona Pinnacles is the gravel road leading in to them. It’s about a 30 minute drive (if you’re driving safely) down a bumpy pothole ridden road. It was even worse leaving at night when it was dark as I was afraid I’d not see a pothole in time and get stuck. Fortunately I had driven the road 3 times before that during my scouting and the 2nd drive in.

      Once at them, you’ll see the large pillars of rock rising up offering almost unlimited compositions. There is one field of pillars about 200 yards from the bathrooms which is where I decided I wanted to take my photos. I also drove around the loop to pick out some secondary compositions in case there were other photographers in my area. I then came back the next day with my wife during sunset to get some pictures while she read a book in the car for the next couple hours (I love my wife!)

      Composition

      Having scouted the area out during daylight, I immediately knew where I wanted to shoot so I tried to strategically park the car in the spot so nobody would drive up to the area and mess up a photo. I was constantly paranoid about other photographers showing up seeing as it’s a popular place. I find nighttime photography to be extremely difficult when other people are around!

      Despite my worries I only saw 2-3 cars pull in during the nighttime and we all respected one another. In fact one women went out of her way to not accidentally shine lights in my area the entire time. As I was leaving I thanked her letting her know, that she’s probably my favorite photographer I’ve ever shot with (lol) and I never even talked to her!

      Back to this photo – as I was wrapping up sunset I started picking out some shots with foreground subjects. I found a lot of rocks about this size so I positioned that in my shot. The wind started to really pick up, perhaps 20 mph and it was blowing sand around like crazy. Because of this I had to leave my one lens on for the entire shoot which is something I don’t usually do. I also wrapped the entire lens mount in a t-shirt to further try to protect it as I was having flashbacks of going to the beach and getting sand in my gear and it never coming out again.

      I then recalled this composition from earlier and got it setup. I also setup my LED light and had to move it several times to get the lighting how I wanted it. As you can see in the before photo, I really didn’t get it right and had to mostly post-process the light into the photo.

      I then fired off a series of shots focused on the foreground and another 5 shots focuses on the stars so I could focus stack these later.

      EXIF Information

        Post Processing

        Like a lot of my night sky photos lately, these took a long time to process. I would estimate each of the four photos in this series took 5 hours each. The later ones were less time as I got into the flow of things. It starts in Lightroom by getting the white balance correct. Then I exposure stacked them manually in Photoshop. After I blended the focus stacked images together. Next, I created a smart object for the ground and another for the sky and made some tweaks to those. After that I removed color noise from the ground and then remove star color using the color blend mode and a gaussian blur. After that I did a lot of defringing on the photo and finally made my mask for the sky and the ground.

        I also tried a new technique for this series of photos by using something called star minimization. This seems counter intuitive as it removes stars or makes them less bright, but it gives more emphasis to the Milky Way as its gets crowed with stars.

        The nice thing with these desert shots is there’s no trees to have to mask around. The western photographers in the US have it really easy as they only have to mask around rocks. Us east of the Mississippi photographers have to deal with that pain in most of our shots!

        Finally, I adjusted the photo with probably 30+ adjustment layers such as color balance, levels, exposure, saturation and hue and saturation.

        Thanks for reading!

        Software Used

        Lightroom
        Photoshop
        Raya Pro

        Techniques Used

        Exposure Stacking
        Focus Stacking

        Have a Question?

        Neal Grosskopf

        Cana Island Lighthouse, Door County, WI – Star Trails

        Before & After

        One of my favorite places to take pictures is at the Cana Island lighthouse in Door County, WI and my favorite time to shoot there is at night when the stars are out.

        Due to it’s low population, Door County offers a unique chance to clearly see the stars without so much of the light pollution that they rest of the state has is it is conveinently close to bigger cities such as Green Bay and Appleton. Because of this I try to go up there several times a year to get some night time pictures.

        I recently purchased a new tripod with an additional arm on it that allows me to attach a phone to the tripod. This allows me to use the phone as a time lapse timer and take 100s of photos over the course of the night. With this ability, I can create time lapse images and also do star trail photos such as the one here.

        Location

        This photo was taken at the Cana Island Lighthouse near Baily’s Harbor in Door County, WI. I was up in Door County for the evening taking pictures for work so I decided to stop here on the way home since it was a clear night out. I didn’t run into any other photographers while here which was nice. The land bridge out to the island was covered in snow and ice so I didn’t get my feet wet heading out there either.

        Composition

        I just learned how to do star trail photos so the first thing to do is find the north star also known as Polaris. The best way to find this is to find the Big Dipper, then from the end of that constellation, it points towards the north star. Once you find that, you need to line it up with something interesting which in this case I used the lighthouse. The North Star is helpful as all other stars in that area of the sky rotate around it giving it this cool look. Originally I wanted to line the top of the lighthouse with this star, but I ran out of room to do so as there was a tree near me so I opted for this composition.

        For this photo I took 100 exposures at a 25 second shutter speed with my Sigma 14mm f1.8 lens I just picked up this fall. I let it run for about an hour.

        EXIF Information

          Post Processing

          The nice thing with star trail photos I’m finding is they take a little less work for post processing than my normal Milky Way photo workflow. Those photos tend to take between 4-8 hours while these was closer to 4 hours. The hardest part I’m finding is making good selections in Photoshop. I’ve just started doing more Photoshop-only editing and am still figuring out how best to do things in there.

          To start with this photo, I imported all the photos to Lightroom, exported them to Photoshop, stacked them on top of one another and then set their layer blending mode to ‘lighten’. This will magically make the light trail effect happen, it’s really that easy!

          After that I started making selections between the sky, ground and lighthouse which was the hard part. After that I did a lot of tweaks to those regions of the photo with contrast, white balance and saturation.

          Software Used

          Lightroom
          Photoshop
          Raya Pro

          Techniques Used

          Exposure Stacking
          Focus Stacking

          Have a Question?