Star Vistas

I have been interested in photography for 30 years.  In 1979 my wife and I began seriously looking at film SLR cameras and in the 1980s we bought our first – a Canon A-1.  A set of good lenses soon followed, and we used that gear for many a year to freeze moments in time…  Most notably, however, I always seemed to shoot sparingly, as film and developing costs were always on my mind.  With 12 or 24 exposures on a roll, and maybe at most a roll or two extra in the bag, every photo was carefully considered.  Photography became a minor hobby at best.

A career software engineer, in the early 1990s I became involved with web publishing as a secondary responsibility, and was provided with a copy of Adobe Photoshop by my then employer.  I was instantly hooked, realizing that SO very much would be possible through digital image processing.  For example, owing to my efforts our company had one of the first graphic web page backgrounds that could be seen on the world wide web. 

By the mid 1990s I was watching carefully as digital camera technology developed - back then the megapixel race started as a kilopixel race – and by 1997 I had my first Olympus digital “SLR-like” camera.  I became and have been involved in online photography forums since that time, and I often spoke of the “freedom of digital” – of being able to say “it’s only data” while shooting whatever and whenever and however often.  With rechargeable batteries it was truly a zero cost proposition to shoot digital photos, and with so much practice my interest and prowess with a camera grew rapidly – as well as my knowledge of digital image processing.  I moved up to Canon’s first “prosumer” digital SLR, then upgraded through their “prosumer” line as time went on, skipping a few models but always being at most a year or two from the leading edge.

My computer hardware and software I kept up to date as well, most notably choosing workstation class machines and upgrading through every version of Adobe Photoshop that was released.  Being a practical thinker I gauged what I did with my digital image processing by my results – i.e., I paid attention to what worked and what didn’t.  Over time I developed quite a number of techniques, and it finally dawned on me to capture these techniques and market them as Photoshop actions.  Image processing and computer software development had a lot in common.  At that time I started ProDigital Software.  My “dSLR Tools” and “dSLR Fractal Sharpen” actions sold well online, and so I found that eCommerce could be the basis for a viable business.

By late 2004 I was doing well enough financially to be able to purchase a fine Meade telescope, and it wasn’t a big stretch to extend my photography and digital imaging hobbies into the night.  What I found was that, while there were a lot of folks taking photos in the daytime, astrophotography was and is – excitingly – still developing. 

It also naturally flowed that I should become involved in astronomy forums.  By chance I found a little forum called OurDarkSkies.com with a particularly friendly group of folks, and I began developing my knowledge of astrophotography as well as the “black art” of Astroimage processing.  From time to time folks would place their astroimages online for others to see, and I found helping others with their images is a great way to both learn and gain experience.  Even though I was capturing a lot of my own images, I found I craved more and different objects than I could get from my quite light-polluted home location, so I began processing other folks’ images as well.  It didn’t take me long to developed a specialized set of astroimage processing actions called Astronomy Tools.

August 5, 2005 – enter Greg Parker… 

A forum member and accomplished astrophotographer named Bud Guinn asked Greg Parker to join our group at OurDarkSkies.com.  It seems Greg had a number of image datasets he’d very carefully captured with his very good optics in his back yard observatory, under the reasonably dark skies of his New Forest location in the south of England, but he found image processing challenging.  Greg noticed my tendency to reprocess images, and said he had “TONS of c**p images” he’d like reworked.  When I finally did look over some of his image datasets, I found that they weren’t “c**p” at all, but rather there was SO much more information in them he hadn’t brought out that I became hooked on processing them.  We worked out how to get hundreds of megabytes from his place to mine, half a globe away, and in what format, so I began to work through his data backlog.  We communicated well, and soon it became clear we had something good going.  We were also becoming fast friends.

We began discussing turning all these images into a “coffee table book” at around the start of 2006, and thus our collaboration took on a goal besides just producing pretty pictures:  We resolved to turn 100 or so astroimages into spectacular full-bleed pages in a book, along with inspirational descriptions and fun facts.  My personal goal is to inspire young people to become interested in the universe around us.  

Our best image capture and digital processing work has gone into the pages of Star Vistas, and Astronomy Tools saw several new versions as I turned techniques I developed while processing these images into useful tools for others to use.

For the public unveiling of Star Vistas at Astrofest 2009 in London, at Greg’s insistence I flew over from the U.S. to the U.K. and stayed a week with him and his wonderful family.  His wife, son, and even his pets made me feel extraordinarily welcome, and we discovered our interests run on many parallels and that quite clearly our friendship is still growing.  I definitely see more books in our future!