Placing My Camera Lens 300 Feet from a Rocket Launch | Hacker News Reader

Placing My Camera Lens 300 Feet from a Rocket Launch

petapixel.com

218 pointsrdoherty60 comments

Please click through to the photographer's web site. He's captured some really nice images. My three favorites:

- "January 7th, 2018: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launches the classified Zuma payload for Northrup Grumman, and lands the first stage of the Falcon 9 back at Cape Canaveral eight minutes after launch"

- "June 11th, 2016: United Launch Alliance's massive Delta IV Heavy rocket launches a top-secret satellite, designated NROL-37, on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office"

- "November 19th, 2016: A United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket launches NASA and NOAA's GOES-R satellite"

There doesn't seem to be a way to link directly to the images. They are hosted on a CDN with an auth hash which I think will expire, so search for the date here:

http://johnkrausphotos.com

He's 18 BTW. At first I misread that he'd been a photographer for 18 years. Bravo.

That long-exposure photo of the Zuma launch is incredible! I've never had an intuitive sense of what the first- and second-stage trajectories look like, but that photo nails it.

I’ve been following his career on the SpaceX subreddit. He’d talk about getting out of school to photograph a launch, or occasionally being unable to do so. For a while he was unable to take close-up pictures because they decided not to accredit minors. He’s quite a guy!

There's another photographer as well (Brady Kenniston) who got some magnificent shots of the Falcon Heavy launch.

This is my favourite:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bradykenniston/26259934188/

Indeed, that's incredible work. Colors are well processed without being over saturated. The technical side is spot on while also maintaining fantastic composition.

Here's the OP's site: http://johnkrausphotos.com/

Even if he's hard on his gear, his images are great and he's only 18. Impressive work for a teenager.

Even as an adult, I wouldn't be able to get those images. I've always wondered how are photographers able to get such clarity for subjects that can be extremely blurry/murky/muddy, such as smoke and even water? Every time I take photos of clouds or water, it always looks dull.

Extremely short shutter speed and perfect preset static focus I'm guessing.

> Every time I take photos of clouds or water, it always looks dull.

If your image is well-lit, in focus and doesn't have motion blur, you are probably just missing post-processing. Most pictures will look rather dull until they are touched-up to make them 'pop' - you can have a look at the before and after images from this Google AI research project[1] that processes landscape photos to make them more pleasing to the eye.

Playing around with brightness, contrast, saturation and color curves can greatly improve a photo.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15973712/google-ai-resear...

Unfortunately, that's what I thought as it means I have to greatly improve my post-processing skills.

Do you have tutorials that go into detail about how one can improve? I've spent the last decade using Lightroom but largely going by what feels right rather than being more technical and deliberate.

I would recommend checking out the channel “phlearn” on YouTube. It is photoshop based, but honestly learning photoshop is worth the time and effort.

Most of the skills are transferable to other editors just by learning the different menu options.

A good post-processing tip is to apply two passes of Unsharp Mask. The first pass adds a general "punch", the second sharpens the fine details.

A good starting point for unsharp mask:

1st pass: Amount 10; Radius 30; Threshold: 0 2nd pass: Amount 100; Radius 0.3; Threshold: 0

Adjust amount based on your judgement. Don't over-sharpen. Sharpening should be the last step after resizing. Obviously always sharpen with the image at 100% zoom. Don't let your DSLR sharpen the image. Shoot in RAW, but resist sharpening at your RAW tweaking stage - just do exposure tweaks at that point, then bring into Photoshop for sharpening and resizing.

Also play with polarizing filters on your lens; ND filters so you can open up aperture to exploit the sweet spot of your lens; reduce your exposure compensation in daylight (my DSLR is always set two stops under); use a lens hood; avoid too much cropping, instead get the framing and focal length right when shooting.

Try taking pictures during the "golden hour" (sunset). Almost any outdoor picture, particularly clouds and water, is going to be much less dull during that time. Colors from the sunset are reflected off of everything else making the image much more vivid.

And like sangnoir said learn how to post-process. If you're taking pictures in RAW format you'll be amazed at how much you can transform a boring picture.

If you want to try to do it in lens, a circular polarizer and a set of gradiated neutral density filters will go a long way to improving your landscape photography.

Try using a circular polarizer?

> his images are great and he's only 18. Impressive work for a teenager.

Kraus has an AW&ST cover photo.[1] Among other commercial photocredits. Impressive work for a... experienced launch photographer.

Sometimes "weight class" is essential context. "It's a nice story... for a 6-year old". "That's a good lap time... for a 60-year old." But sometimes, not so much.

And sometimes, yuck. It's been a few years now since I last heard "she's a good programmer... for a woman." Yay. :/

[1] https://twitter.com/johnkrausphotos/status/96356696031433932... http://aviationweek.com/aviation-week-space-technology/2018-...

Fair. Would you agree that age is relevant context in an experience-based field? The OP's relatively young age puts an upper bound on how many years of experience he has doing this sort of work. And he's clearly mastered an impressive range of techniques.

I don't know.

But see also Lartigue, who made some of the most wonderful photographs I have ever seen before he was 10 years old — https://www.lartigue.org/en/jacques-henri-lartigue/biography... — and Aaron Swartz — http://www.aaronsw.com/

I think when a person finds what they love to do at an early age, through supportive rather than forceful education, they bloom.

Recommended reading: Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti

> Would you agree that age is relevant context in an experience-based field?

Long ago as a kid, I had a conversation something like "I play the piano. Are you good? I've played for 4 years. But how good are you?" And I didn't know how to answer.

Years can contain a lot of practice, or not. With diverse concepts of "a lot" (eg some dancers). With rapid progress, or not. Achieving some form of excellence, or not. Excellence as compared to... who, or what? By what standard and emphasis?

I'm still fuzzy on just why "Good, for a foo" bothers me. Maybe because it sometimes unpacks as something like "Better than is to be expected from someone like you"? Which can certainly be a reasonable and statistically supported observation. But those hidden extra parameters seem troublesome ones. Someone's filter for what aspects of "you" matter. Someone's expectation over those aspects. And the focus seems shifted from the work, to the person.

I once separately encountered some teachers from the same school, who seemed to have a story in common. That their students were failing to learn physics, because "they are at that age - hormones". This, despite the regrettably little physics which is generally taught. That they were teaching physics really badly, seemed off their radar as an alternate or supplemental hypothesis. If they had then said "oh, but Joe, his physics is excellent for an Nth-grader"... there would have been so much wrongness embedded in that short phrase.

A friend mentioned that in the high-dollar government lab he works in, they use a blast shield and a mirror in these applications. Mirror is a lot cheaper to replace than some of their lenses.

But it does make it harder to stabilize the image. Especially when the decibels are high like in a launch.

It's a daylight photo, use a fast shutter

Wow, those images are gorgeous.

"We were warned by our NASA escort to not touch our faces after handling equipment coated in the solid rocket exhaust and to wash our hands ASAP after arriving back at the KSC Press Site."

Next picture: touches exhaust residue with bare hands. Please, use gloves!

"Using a glass filter triples the area that dew can form prior to liftoff."

A-ha, it is time to start building heated glass filters for rocket photography enthusiasts!

"Dew heaters" are already a thing!

http://philhart.com/content/dew-heaters-night-sky-photograph...

https://www.amazon.com/COOWOO-Warmer-Heater-Universal-Telesc...

From the reddit thread where the photographer posted this, they're planning to get some:

https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/81fu6u/the_res...

What would the substances have been on the glass? I assume it would be something nasty but my chemistry is poor. Also, do workers wear haz-mat suits when working in the area? I'd guess there is a lot of the same stuff on the ground/atmosphere that could be inhaled. The ecological damage of launches is something I should really look more in to.

HTPB, unburnt ammonium perchlorate, aluminum powder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl-terminated_polybutadi...

And the combustion products include lots of water and hydrogen chloride, which combine to form hydrochloric acid. The gritty aluminum oxide (another combustion product) is probably a pretty good particulate sponge for holding acid as it cools below HCl's condensation point.

Thanks both for the reply. Is the Aluminimum oxide forming part of a thermite style reaction then?

only to the extend that the Al powder in the motor is burning in the O2 released from the perchlorate, it'[s not an exchange like a traditional thermite

Essentially they add Al because it burns well and has a high mass which ups the mass of the exhaust gasses and as a result gives you more thrust

Somewhat yes. Iron oxide is included, but considered a catalyst.

The rubbery plastic binder is a fuel. The Aluminum is a high-energy fuel. The "ammonium" part of ammonium perchlorate is a fuel, and the "perchlorate" part is an oxidizer.

The amount of aluminum is limited to prevent the temperature from getting too high and because it makes low-energy exhaust particles. Good exhaust particles are low-mass gasses with few degrees of freedom in the molecular shape. Aluminum oxide forms solid particles consisting of many atoms stuck together, which is pretty useless.

My understanding is post-shuttle launch, the ponds around the launch pad end up with a pH of ~1, due to the hydrochloride acid released.

Not of any life form that can survive that.

The soil around the launch site must be loaded with acidic exhaust particles and other residue, yet grass still grows right up to the edge of the platform. That's one tough variety!

Probably St. Augustine grass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Augustine_Grass) given that it is Florida.

St. Augustine is so tough, it even crowds out weeds! Not as soft as the Bermuda grass on golf courses, but very resilient.

I'm pretty sure Bermuda grass can never be killed. No matter what you do to it, it always comes back. It's the athlete's foot of lawn pests.

In Berkeley ~25 years ago we had a severe frost, pipes popped, the eugenia hedge dies and so did the bermuda grass lawns too .. we pulled them and replaced them with traditional sod

So ... yes it can be killed ....

Did you dig the Bermuda grass out of the ground? Physically removing every blade, runner and root nodule it is the only way I know of to get rid of it.

All the Bermuda grass in our yard in Texas died after 3+ years of 90 days over 100 while the Saint Agustin keeps growing and growing.

"the sound alone would kill anyone standing at the launchpad during liftoff."

Didn't know you could die from sound. Curious as to how that works.

I imagine the sound pressure would liquefy your organs.

Just speculating here but a "sound wave" at those energies could be similar to a shock wave from an explosive.

Just to give an idea of how loud this is: have you ever watched a video of a launch and heard a crackle in the rumble? It sounds like the sound is overdriving the microphone and clipping, but it’s not. It’s overdriving the air.

Sound is variation in air pressure, with the peaks of the wave representing the maximum pressure and the troughs representing the minimum. But there’s a hard floor on how low the minimum can go. Once you hit zero pressure, that’s it. The waveform clips. That’s the crackle in a rocket launch.

One of his images is very similar to a really nice gif of the rockets firing that was featured on reddit the other day (by another photographer): https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/81xnmv/i_could_st...

I severely recommend using a mirror, that's how everyone does (and did) it.

A well cleaned mirror won't look any worse than straight through the lense.

Won't the mirror collect dew?

And vibrate independently of the camera.

Whether vibration is from the camera or the mirror does not matter; both will reduce quality on the image, assuming a slow exposure. But these exposures look very fast. Even so, if the camera can be made stable, then so surely too can a mirror.

> Even so, if the camera can be made stable, then so surely too can a mirror.

I don't think it makes sense to look at it as a binary of stable or not stable: the camera can be made stable to a certain degree, and the mirror introduces additional instability (even if just stochastically). I could understand wanting to minimize that.

> both will reduce quality on the image

Yep. So why have two instead of one?

Why blow hundreds or thousands of dollars on damaging and replacing lenses? Photography doesn't generally pay well enough to afford that for very long.

"I’d likely be able to replace just the front element, but I picked up this lens for a hundred bucks, so if I want to do a fisheye shot for a future launch, I’ll probably just buy another one."

Basically any setup to protect the lens will end up costing about as much as the lens.

A 30x30cm Mirror (which is enough to get the image to the camera) costs about 12$ with a quick google search. It's even high quality silver.

With a small price at the start you can probably 3D print an apparatus that contains stabilizers for both camera and mirror plus a mechanism to easily swap mirrors.

It'll collect dirt.

A lot of rocket starts have been filmed and photographed using mirrors.

A small silvermirror is much much cheaper than most lenses and doesn't change picture quality much (if the mirror glass is good).

Mirrors can also be easier cleaned; in the simplest model you pour acid over the backside to dissolve the silver then run the silver-drenched acid over a mirror while neutralizing it (of course the actual process is much more complicated.

> Using a glass filter triples the area that dew can form prior to liftoff. I’ve had shots ruined by dew forming on the front element.

I hate to see the waste still. Use a filter but also build yourself a little heated wrapper that keeps the camera and it’s lens above the dew point.

I think the filter you would need for a fisheye like that would be specialized and somewhat expensive, though, due to the protruding front element. Someone in the comments said it would pretty much be the cost of the lens.

Yes, filters that big of any quality would cost more than the $133 fisheye lens he used and add one more thing that could go wrong. I'd gladly sacrifice a $1300 lens to capture a rocket launch that close. Mitigating lens damage is simply something no professional photographer is going to care about in that situation.

Those are some amazing images! Just looked at his personal website and I am thoroughly impressed.

This is one talented young photographer.

If it pitted the glass lense, wouldn't the solid exhaust penetrate the plastic bag? I'm surprised there was no other damage.

I don't think that follows. Sand can pit a lens, right. And yet sand with the same force wouldn't penetrate a plastic bag.

I think it's about force and hardness, contrasted against elastic and inelastic collisions.

Either that, or maybe the caustic qualities have something to do with it? I'm not sure of the chemical aspects of the exhaust, but that part is also mentioned in conjunction with the debris accumulation.

space-station transitioning the moon is also excellent !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com