That old guy with the telescope at the park changed how I see photos

About 3 years back I was out at Cherry Creek State Park near Denver taking shots of the Milky Way with my budget DSLR. An older gentleman set up this massive 12 inch dob nearby and after a while he walked over and looked at my screen. He didn't say anything about the gear or the settings, he just pointed at one faint smudge in my image and said "that one's more important than all the bright stars put together." I thought he was talking about Andromeda but he laughed and said no, that's a tiny distant galaxy like 40 million light years away. He told me he'd spent 50 years looking up and that the faint stuff always tells the deeper story because it's harder to reach. I never got his name but every time I edit a photo now I look for the faint details first instead of the flashy ones. Anyone else ever had a stranger at a dark site shift how they process their shots?

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daniel_cooper3418d ago

Funny, I'm the total opposite on this one. I shoot dark sky stuff all the time and those faint little fuzzies just look like noise to me until I've punched up the bright core and the colorful gas clouds. Give me a big bright Andromeda or a screaming meteor any day, that's what gets people excited about looking up in the first place.

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craig.viola18d ago

Punching up the core until it looks like that? That's straight up cheating.

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