Orion's belt and sword

... Moscow variant. Strong light pollution of the city causes bright sky at long exposured shots. For this picture i use 67 RAW shots, aligned with Hugin's "align_image_stack" utility and averaged. This allows to get Orion nebula's natural color, but it's size and details still unacceptable. Next time i'll try capturing this nebula with better camera settings and bigger series of source shots. Star colors looks better in original resolution: 1567 * 2093 pixels.

I wrote small post about averaging stack of shots here: english / russian.

Emerald city

3644 x 2733

Moscow Kremlin, october 2013. For better clarity and colors i averaged multiple shots for each exposure (2 shots for brightest and 8 for other 5 exposures, 42 shots total). I wrote small post about averaging stack of shots: english / russian.

Print available at: deviantart.com, 500px.com.

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The beauty of imperfection

Large snowflake, 5-6 mm. It have one reduced branch, but i like pattern in its center. 7 serial shots averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Background: dark woolen fabric, natural light (gray clouded sky), external optics Helios 44M-5, march 2013, Moscow. Looks better in original resolution: 2120 * 1590 pixels.

More snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

Silverware / Neon

Large snowflake, around 7 mm. 8 shots averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Glass background with backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5, january 2013, Moscow.

2667 * 2000

Same shot with inverted luminocity and different contrast curve and color gradient.

2667 * 2000

More snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

Snowflakes - printable versions, part I

 >> snowflakes - printable versions, part II

Trying to do something with low resolution of snowflake shots. I enlarged pictures 2x using SmartEdge demo, free resampling program. It works very slow, but produces output with good looking lines and edges and preserves textures clarity. This demo version also have input image restrictions (resolution should not be bigger than 512x512 pixels), so i processed whole pictures part by part and then reassemled.

Then i applied one of these nice freeware canvas textures in "soft light" blending mode with small opacity. This texture masked noise and resampling artifacts, making picture more appealing (i hope) at 1:1 scale view.

1600 * 1200


2048 * 1536


2294 * 1720


2048 * 1536


4096 * 3072

All snowflakes in album snowflakes and snow crystals, print versions here: snowflakes for print.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.