Castellane

Clear skies are not my favorites when it comes to landscape photography. I enjoy dramatic light around sunset and sunrise on my travels. But I don't always get that. In fact, most of the time I get pretty flat light on my travels.

So over the past to years I started to do more and more Astrophotography to squeeze some nice photos out of those clear skies. Here's one example. I took this photo in the Gorges du Verdon in France last month with the Moon rising over the canyon.

If you are interested how I take such photos and how I edit them, I just published an in-depth article about Astrophotography on my blog.

9 Minutes of time captured on a beautiful calm morning in the Verdon Canyon.

If you ever visit the Valensole area to capture Lavender Fields make sure to also visit the Canyon, which in my opinion is much more interesting to explore!

Some Tech: I used a lee 0.6 hard edge here to darken the sky a bit. The exposure time was around 9 minutes at ISO 160. For this shot I also use long exposure noise reduction since I wasn't sure what the 5DsR could handle. I also have a shot of 9 minutes and ISO200 without NR taken just minutes before. Well for those interested, long exposures up to a minute seem no problem for the 5dsr even without NR. With 9 Minutes on a fairly warm morning I didn't get the typical hot pixels, which I am used to from my 5D Mark II. But the darker parts of the image showed some greyish dots (dunno how to describe it). Without pulling up the darks they were hard to spot. Also with NR the shadows were clean here. Maybe I'll put up some crops at some point. It's really not a big deal but on a 2meter print I think one would notice it g. So it was good to wait the additional 9 minutes, making this a 18 minute photo.

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Nice perspective after Tunnel of Baou, in Verdon Regional Natural Parc, France.