The Geminids meteor shower is the quintessential time for capturing the streaks from the heavens. This year, it was clear and the show was spectacular. I photographed from 9:15 PM on the 13th to 5 AM on the 14th of December. Then the fun begins gathering the strike images for blending. The image illustrating this article are the meteors in place before rotation to show the origin point.

Mining for meteors

Why do I call it “mining for meteors?” Well, out of 1,230 images captured, there were only around 40 containing visualized meteors. Eventually, only 27 made the final cut. Every photo needed to be examined to determine if it was usable. It’s a long process but worth it. I found that Adobe Bridge was a big help after I figured out a couple of things to make it easier to see the images.

adobe bridge navigation window
Adobe Bridge window set the way I like to work. Images across the bottom and navigation on the left, preview image above.
full screen window in adobe Bridge
Go full screen by tapping the space bar. Leave full screen by pressing the space bar as well.

Adobe Bridge tips

I’m a certified ‘Bridge-a-file’ as that is how I work with managing my images. These techniques can be applied with Lightroom as well if that is your jam. First load your RAW images into a folder. In Bridge, navigate to the folder. Here’s where it gets better for finding small changes in photos. Highlight the first image in the sequence. Tap the Space Bar. Now the image is being shown full screen. Much easier to see what is going on!

geminid meteor
Looking for these meteor streaks though the whole image can be difficult which is why you’ll want to view in full screen by pressing the Space Bar and using the arrows to navigate through the files. When you have a meteor add a tag using the numbers on your keyboard to rate the images.

To navigate through your files, use the Right Arrow key. When you see a meteor, tag the image with a number or color. I just use the number one and it adds a star. There are five stars possible. If you would like to remove the number from the image, type zero. If you are more color-oriented, the keys six through nine will give your image a color tag. Six is coral, seven yellow, eight green, and nine blue. If you want to remove a color tag, tap the number again. Want to change a color tag? Just tap a different number.

Gathering the images

planes
When you first start your night photography it’s possible to mistake flying objects such as planes and satellites for meteors.

Once you have mined all the photos, they will be intermixed among the non-meteor photos. All you need to do is go to View > Sort > By Rating. They will all gather together at the end of your files. Once you have processed the images in Adobe Camera Raw, select the first of your rated images, then Shift Click at the end so they are all selected. Go to the Menu and Tools > Photoshop > Load Files into Photoshop Layers. All your files will be opened into a single file stacked on top of each other.

Post-processing

There’s a lot more to processing the meteors you have mined from the sky. I’ll have another article dedicated to that shortly.

Yours in creative Photography, Bob