Volume 4, Issue 2, 7 June 2024

Carpe Noctem! - Seize the Night!

Hello and welcome to the Carpe Noctem! newsletter

I hope everyone had a lovely spring, as I did in Massachusetts. It still is great weather without the humid heat that usually kicks in around May.

I have a few announcements and reports about recent activities for you. Let's dive right in.

There are still spots available for my Daytime Long Exposure workshop at the Griffin Museum, see link below. That will start in just a few weeks.

Also in two weeks will be the second advanced night photography weekend workshop, learning how to shoot the Milky Way and how to process it afterwards. That announcement is also below.

Together with my friend Lisa, I am ramping up for our exhibit Industrial Beauty, Luminous Desert, starting on August 18 through November 3rd. Save the date for the the reception, which is scheduled for September 22, 1-4 p.m. I will send reminders out for both shortly before. We plan to have printed photo books available for that show.

You are receiving this newsletter, because you signed up for it or gave me permission to add you to the distribution list on one of my workshops, presentations, live or online events. You can unsubscribe at any time, simply scroll to the bottom to find that link. If you want to continue receiving it, thank you for your interest, you will remain on the list without further action.

Spring/Summer Workshops

If you live in the Boston area, consider attending one of my workshops.

The first one is an advanced night photography weekend on June 28-30, there is still time and space to sign up! The workshop consists of a 3 hour introduction on Zoom, followed by a 3 hour photo shoot on site an hour west of Boston. We will wrap up with an in-person editing session at the Griffin Museum on Sunday morning, where I will guide attendees with editing techniques for this kind of image and demos on how to get the most of the images you took.

The workshop covers advanced night concepts like astro-landscape photography, star points, star trails, cloud bands and light painting.

The second workshop will be a 9-week course from June 26 to August 21, where we alternate five classroom sessions with four photo shoots. We will take photos in the Boston area, with classroom sessions at the Griffin Museum, which include a comprehensive introduction to the topic, recurring photo reviews and live editing sessions.

Post-processing techniques will emphasize the powerful Lightroom / CameraRaw masking features, as well as trichroic conversions, HDR and panorama creation.

Daytime Long Exposure (DLE) Photography is a wonderful addition to any landscape skill set. DLE captures time, or the effect of time, making images look serene and very different from the momentary exposures that we are used to taking.

eBooks

I have more downloadable content to my Patreon store. Aside from the Iceland travel maps that I published last year, you can now download the below eBooks.

Click on the links to get to the respective pages. Four of these are included in the above workshops.

If you have any suggestions or requests for future eBook topics, please do let me know by replying to this email.

Introduction to Light Painting & Light Drawing
Introduction to Urban Night Photography
Introduction to Daytime Long Exposures (you will get this free with above workshop)
Introduction to Astro-Landscape Photography, the best companion to (and free with) the weekend workshop
A full tutorial on how to shoot solar eclipses.
A preparation guide for daytime long exposures (included in the above workshop)
A preparation guide for night photography (included in the weekend workshop_

Patreon Update: What's new?

My Patreon channel now has almost 350 articles from the past four years. Here's a selection of what has been added since my last newsletter. Many of these are public, you can follow my channel for free.

Jürgen's Patreon Channel

A full report about the recent solar eclipse
A tutorial on how to build yourself a backlight scanner for light painting
A comprehensive list of super-wide angle and fast lenses for astro-landscape photography
A tutorial on how to use a gimbal for kinetic photography
A tutorial on how to use Adobe's Portfolio to easily and quickly build yourself a website

You can find almost 60 public posts that you can read without signing up. Look under COLLECTIONS - PUBLIC

Infrared Night Photography

I have done a lot of infrared photography and, over the past two years, almost exclusivley at night. I had a Nikon Z6, which I converted to full spectrum and this is the camera that made me discover Infralucent Clouds (ILC) in 2021, those wonderful, faint clouds that you can only see in infrared.

The time for that camera has come to an end, I decided to sell it and upgraded to a newer model, which is more capable, has built-in long exposure times and better performance. More importantly, it is the same model as my regular main camera, so operating it at night, I don't constantly have to rethink what I'm doing. Night photography is dark and challenging, any usability improvement goes a long way. The newly converted Z6II has already been out and about, you can see one image from last weekend here, showcasing very strong ILC.

Being the scientist that I am, I also started reaching out to cloud specialists trying to figure out exactly what kind of clouds these are. I know that they are not noctilucent = nacreous = polar stratospheric clouds, so I'm eager to solve that puzzle. Stay tuned about what I find.

Until next time, please find me online here.

Have a wonderful summer!

And, of course, with lots of (night) photography!