Kayak at sunset, photo dark compared to video, due to 4k unbinned pixels of image - GO PRO example

Here is a crop of a still image I took with the little Hero camera near Dexter 
Michigan.   What was interesting about this picture was it was dark.   This is 
not the original photo but a painted and touched up version of it.

The actual HDTV video was much brighter at that time of day and when I switched 
the camera over to still and took a photo I got a nice large shot but it was 
dark.   Why?

Well in astronomy many cameras are setup to offer grouping of pixels and sensor 
pixels are used as a group to get lower resolution still images which are using 
a set of pixels effectively causing a feature known as"binning".   It turns out 
the Go Pro uses a binning kind of process which groups pixels from a large 4k 
sensor and causes a smaller image to be much brighter.   When it was using all 
the pixels and getting higher resolution the image was much darker.   The 
exposure is so dark that a blurring of colors and undersaturated blacks occur in 
the original image.   I had to darken and change contrast a bit and used a 
surrealistic + filter inside Photoshop before using a painting filter.  This 
allowed me to get a half decent but still dark painting which of course was 
cropped for this version as well, reframing the image a bit.

The Go Pro hero is a pretty nice camera, but it doesn't match the capabilities 
of a nice dslr camera. 

A request from my friends wife which saw the original was for me to turn the photo

into something black and white, with almost no color.  Due to the limitations

of the photo being very dark and over-saturated with greens, I found pushing the colors

and working it more like a painting gave a better result. 

Kayak at sunset.

I didn't take a picture of the Nova last time we were out.

Tim Campbell took a photo of the Nova using his Canon 60DA EOS camera.

I don't have that photo right now for this post, but may use it for an article in this month's Star Stuff (FAAC club Newsletter).  I'm late at getting that article together, so I don't know if I'll even get that update published this month.

Yesterday I tried to combine kayaking with Astronomy.  Or I should say go kayaking and have my telescope ready for Astronomy if the weather proved to be reasonable for viewing.  It turned out I didn't have enough energy and will to break away from chatting and talking after kayaking, so I didn't do any Astronomy out in Dexter, although I had my telescope in the car.

I took a Hero 3 Black Edition camera with me while kayaking.  I ended up taking a few videos with it in the waterproof case.  I also took a few stills, but this was of the little river near Dexter and I could see the moon rising over the water as I kayaked back toward my friends house.

Here's a picture I took from the kayak.  I've done a little photo manipulation to correct the fisheye distortion in the original using Adobe Photoshop CS6.  I used a 15mm lens correction and -22 custom correction to get the photo into a nicer perspective, losing most of the fisheye distortion.   The reflection of the moon in the water looked really nice near sunset.  The dark water had an almost polarizing effect on the reflected view.


It's a nice night out tonight and I may still stop by the observatory to try to get a spectroscopy photo of the nova for spectral analysis.  We have a filter to take a photo of something like this, but I don't know if I'll be awake enough to head over there and give it a try.  There's is a chance I'll go over.  We'll see.   I put out a post of the results if I'm able to make it there.