Volume 4, Issue 4, 16 December 2024

Welcome to the Carpe Noctem! newsletter

Are you ready for the holidays? Let's go out and create some sparkly images, full of colorful lights and star bursts. Night time makes all of those light installations look very cheerful.

Looking for a generous gift for yourself or a special person in your life? I am happy to announce that I will be presenting at the next Night Photo Summit in January, read about it and register below.

I will also soon release a new tutorial for photographing Lunar Eclipses. You'll find more info on that further below.

As I wrap up the year, I am spending my last work week at my science job and I am looking forward to renovating my new, second residence in Germany starting in 2 weeks, where I will spend more time going forward. It's in a house at the Baltic Sea coast, far enough north to hopefully see the aurora from time to time. I am already bookmarking all sorts of interesting locations to be photographed, including lots of abandoned buildings in what used to be East Germany, lighthouses and wind generator plants.

I will be back with another newsletter in January.

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.

Moon Streaks at the Night Photo Summit

I am honored to be part of the next Night Photo Summit, the online education event organized by the National Parks at Night team.

The summit is from Friday, January 24 to Sunday the 26th, 2025 and will have 35 presenters providing 45 hours of educational content, and there will be $12000 worth of give-aways. I will be giving away 10 copies of my lunar eclipse tutorial (see next) to the attendees of my talk.

My presentation will be about creating streaks of the rising or setting moon by using very long exposures of 10 to 40 minutes, a photography technique that I have been promoting for a few years now and which we often practice in my Meetup group. These moon streaks show subtle details of the differently shaded moon features, but do not clip in the highlights.

I will cover the equipment that one needs to do this type of photography, the planning for locations to have interesting foreground objects, tips & tricks when onsite and also the post-processing steps, which are important for intriguing results.

I hope to you see you there!

New Lunar Eclipse Tutorial

There will be a total lunar eclipse coming up in March, a wonderful opportunity to shoot the blood moon, that maroon-red colored shade, which happens when the moon is fully eclipsed by Earth's shadow.

I will shortly release a new eBook, a 25 page in-depth tutorial on how to photograph lunar eclipses.

Stay tuned for that announcement in early January.

Patreon Update: What's new?

My Patreon channel now has close to 400 articles from the past five 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 short tutorial on Solar activity, the Aurora and How to See it
An easier way of creating trichroic images
A tutorial on how to create urban star trails
A discussion about how dark or bright a night photo should be, including dynamic range considerations
Many inspirational posts with whole photo sets

You can find more than 70 public posts that you can read without payment, just follow the channel. Look under COLLECTIONS - PUBLIC or simply scroll down.

Until next time, please find me online here.

I wish you happy holidays and a great start of the new year!

Hopefully with at least some (night) photography!