Like it or not this video compares the real usable dynamic range of Nikons’ three most used cameras for landscape photography. Everyone bangs on endlessly about dynamic range when in fact most of them have no clue what they’re talking about. If you want to see the truth about dynamic range improvements since 2012 then the results of this video may well come as a shock!
If you want to see the tonal response curves of the three Nikon models AND the Canon 5DMk3 then click the image below to view at full size:
As you can see, there is very little difference between the three Nikon cameras in the highlight to midtone zone, and the biggest difference between all 4 cameras comes on the left side of the chart, the shadows and lower midtones.
When faced with a high contrast scene like this most photographers would automatically resort to bracketing shots.
Sometimes you will be in a situation where shooting a bracketed sequence is difficult or impossible.
But a single image exposed to the right of the histogram – ETTR – where highlights are recorded at their maximum level of exposure can allow the camera sensor to capture far more detail in the darker areas than Lightroom will allow you to see at first glance.
Exposing to the right (of the in-camera histogram) correctly means that you expose the brightest scene highlights AS HIGHLIGHTS.
But it’s a balancing act between exposing them fully, and ‘blowing’ them.
Getting the ETTR exposure correct invariably means that the sensor receives MORE exposure across all tonal ranges, so you end up with more usefully recoverable shadow detail too.
In this video I show you a full Lightroom and Photoshop workflow to produce a noise-free image from a raw file exposed in just such a way.
Members of my Patreon site can download the all the workflow steps together with the raw file so that they can follow my processing, and perhaps come up with their own versions too!
Just to keep you up to speed on my video channel, here’s my previous video from last week which illustrates how I do my dust-spot and blemish removal in Photoshop:
One of my patrons, Paul Smith, and I ventured down to Shropshire and the spectacular quartsite ridge of The Stiperstones to get this image of the Milky Way and Mars (the large bright ‘star’ above the rocks on the left).
I always work the same way for astro landscape photography, beginning with getting into position just before sunset.
Using the PhotoPills app on my phone I can see where the milky way will be positioned in my field of view at the time of peak sky darkness. This enables me to position the camera exactly where I want it for the best composition.
The biggest killer in astro landscape photography is excessive noise in the foreground.
The other problem is that foregrounds in most images of this genre are not sharp due to a lack of depth of field at the wide apertures you need to shoot the night sky at – f2.8 for example.
To get around this problem we need to shoot a separate foreground image at a lower ISO, a narrower aperture and focused closer to the camera.
Some photographers change focus, engage long exposure noise reduction and then shoot a very long exposure. But that’s an eminently risky thing to do in my opinion, both from a technical standpoint and one of time – a 60 minute exposure will take 120 minutes to complete.
The length of exposure is chosen to allow the very low photon-count from the foreground to ‘build-up’ on the sensor and produced a usable level of exposure from what little natural light is around.
From a visual perspective, when it works, the method produces images that can be spectacular because the light in the foreground matches the light in the sky in terms of directionality.
Light Painting
To get around the inconvenience of time and super-long exposures a lot of folk employ the technique of light painting their foregrounds.
Light painting – in my opinion – destroys the integrity of the finished image because it’s so bloody obvious! The direction of light that’s ‘painted’ on the foreground bares no resemblance to that of the sky.
The other problem with light painting is this – those that employ the technique hardly ever CHECK to see if they are in the field of view of another photographer – think about that one for a second or two!
My Method
As I mentioned before, I set up just before sunset. In the shot above I knew the milky way and Mars were not going to be where I wanted them until just after 1am, but I was set up by 9.20pm – yep, a long wait ahead, but always worth the effort.
As we move towards the latter half of civil twilight I start shooting my foreground exposure, and I’ll shoot a few of these at regular intervals between then and mid nautical twilight.
Because I shoot raw the white balance set in camera is irrelevant, and can be balanced with that of the sky in Photoshop during post processing.
The key things here are that I have a shadowless even illumination of my foreground which is shot at a low ISO, in perfect focus, and shot at say f8 has great depth of field.
Once deep into blue hour and astronomical twilight the brighter stars are visible and so I now use full magnification in live view and focus on a bright star in the cameras field of view.
Then it’s a waiting game – waiting for the sky to darken to its maximum and the Milky Way to come into my desired position for my chosen composition.
Shooting the Sky
Astro landscape photography is all about showing the sky in context with the foreground – I have absolutely ZERO time for those popular YouTube photographers who composite a shot of the night sky into a landscape image shot in a different place or a different angle.
Good astro landscape photography HAS TO BE A COMPOSITE though – there is no way around that.
And by GOOD I mean producing a full resolution image that will sell through the agencies and print BIG if needed.
The key things that contribute to an image being classed good in my book are simple:
Pin-point stars with no trailing
Low noise
Sharp from ‘back’ to ‘front’.
Pin-points stars are solely down to correct shutter speed for your sensor size and megapixel count.
Low noise is covered by shooting a low ISO foreground and a sequence of high ISO sky images, and using Starry Landscape Stacker on Mac (Sequator on PC appears to be very similar) in conjunction with a mean or median stacking mode.
Further noise cancelling is achieved but the shooting of Dark Frames, and the typical wide-aperture vignetting is cancelled out by the creation of a flat field frame.
And ‘back to front’ image sharpness should be obvious to you from what I’ve already written!
So, I’ll typically shoot a sequence of 20 to 30 exposures – all one after the other with no breaks or pauses – and then a sequence of 20 to 30 dark frames.
Shutter speeds usually range from 4 to 6 seconds
Watch this video on my YouTube Channel about shutter speed:
Best viewed on the channel itself, and click the little cog icon to choose 1080pHD as the resolution.
Putting it all Together
Shooting all the frames for astro landscape photography is really quite simple.
Putting it all together is fairly simple and straight forward too – but it’s TEDIOUS and time-consuming if you want to do it properly.
But I wanted to try Raw Therapee for this Stiperstones image, and another of my patrons – Frank – wanted a video of processing methodology in Raw Therapee.
Easier said than done, cramming 4 hours into a typical YouTube video! But after about six attempts I think I’ve managed it, and you can see it here, but I warn you now that it’s 40 minutes long:
Best viewed on the channel itself, and click the little cog icon to choose 1080pHD as the resolution.
I hope you’ve found the information in this post useful, together with the YouTube videos.
I don’t monetize my YouTube videos or fill my blog posts with masses of affiliate links, and I rely solely on my patrons to help cover my time and server costs. If you would like to help me to produce more content please visit my Patreon page on the button above.
Over 11 hours of video training, spread across 58 videos…well, I told you it was going to be big!
And believe me, I could have made it even bigger, because there is FAR MORE to image sharpening than 99% of photographers think.
And you don’t need ANY stupid sharpener plugins – or noise reductions ones come to that. Because Photoshop does it ALL anyway, and is far more customizable and controllable than any plugin could hope to be.
So don’t waste your money any more – spend it instead, on some decent training to show you how to do the job properly in the first place!
You won’t find a lot of these methods anywhere else on the internet – free or paid for – because ‘teachers cannot teach what they don’t know’ – and I know more than most!
As you can see from the list of lessons above, I cover more than just ‘plain old sharpening’.
Traditionally, image sharpening produces artifacts – usually white and black halos – if it’s over done. And image sharpening emphasizes ‘noise’ in areas of shadow and other low frequency detail, when it’s applied to an image in the ‘traditional’, often taught, blanket manner.
Why sharpen what isn’t in focus – to do so is madness, because all you do is sharpen the noise, and cause more artifacts!
Maximum sharpening should only be applied to detail in the image that is ‘fully in focus’.
So, as ‘focus sharpness’ falls off, so to should the level of applied sharpening. That way, noise and other artifacts CAN NOT build up in an image.
And the same can be said for noise reduction, but ‘in reverse’.
So image sharpening needs to be applied in a differential manor – and that’s what this training is all about.
Using a brush in Lightroom etc to ‘brush in’ some sort of differential sharpening is NOT a good idea, because it’s imprecise, and something of a fools task.
Why do I say that? Simple……. Because the ‘differential factor bit’ is contained within the image itself – and it’s just sitting there on your computer screen WAITING for you to get stuck in and use it.
But, like everything else in modern digital photography, the knowledge and skill to do so has somehow been lost in the last 12 to 15 years, and the internet is full of ‘teachers’ who have never had these skills in the first place – hence they can’t teach ’em!
However, everyone who buys this training of mine WILL have those skills by the end of the course.
It’s been a real hard slog to produce these videos. Recording the lessons is easy – it’s the editing and video call-outs that take a lot of time. And I’ve edited all the audio in Audacity to remove breath sounds and background noise – many thanks to Curtis Judd for putting those great lessons on YouTube!
The price is £59.99. So right now, that’s over 11 hours of training for less than £5.50 per hour – that’s way cheaper than a 1to1, or even a workshop day with a crowd of other people!
So head off over to my download store and buy it, because what you’ll learn will improve your image processing, whether it’s for big prints or just jpegs on the web – guaranteed – just click here!
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
A lot of people imagine that there is some sort of ‘magic bullet’ method for sharpening images.
Well, here’s the bad news – there isn’t !
Even if you shoot the same camera and lens combo at the same settings all the time, your images will exhibit an array of various properties.
And those properties, and the ratio/mix thereof, can, and will, effect the efficacy of various sharpening methods and techniques.
And, those properties will rarely be the same from shoot to shoot.
Add interchangeable lenses, varied lighting conditions, and assorted scene brightness and contrast ranges to the mix – now the range of image properties has increased exponentially.
What are the properties of an image that can determine your approach to sharpening?
I’m not even going to attempt to list them all here, because that would be truly frightening for you.
But sharpening is all about pixels, edges and contrast. And our first ‘port of call’ with regard to all three of those items is ‘demosaicing’ and raw file conversion.
“But Andy, surely the first item should be the lens” I here you say.
No, it isn’t.
And if that were the case, then we would go one step further than that, and say that it’s the operators ability to focus the lens!
So we will take it as a given, that the lens is sharp, and the operator isn’t quite so daft as they look!
Now we have a raw file, taken with a sharp lens and focused to perfection.
Let’s hand that file to two raw converters, Lightroom and Raw Therapee:
I am Lightroom – Click me!
I am Raw Therapee – Click me!
In both raw converters there is ZERO SHARPENING being applied. (and yes, I know the horizon is ‘wonky’!).
Now check out the 800% magnification shots:
Lightroom at 800% – Click me!
Raw Therapee at 800% – Click me!
What do we see on the Lightroom shot at 800%?
A sharpening halo, but hang on, there is NO sharpening being applied.
But in Raw Therapee there is NO halo.
The halo in Lightroom is not a sharpening halo, but a demosaicing artifact that LOOKS like a sharpening halo.
It is a direct result of the demosaicing algorithm that Lightroom uses.
Raw Therapee on the other hand, has a selection of demosaicing algorithms to choose from. In this instance, it’s using its default AMaZE (Alias Minimization & Zipper Elimination) algorithm. All told, there are 10 different demosaic options in RT, though some of them are a bit ‘old hat’ now.
There is no way of altering the base demosaic in Lightroom – it is something of a fixed quantity. And while it works in an acceptable manner for the majority of shots from an ever burgeoning mass of digital camera sensors, there will ALWAYS be exceptions.
Let’s call a spade a bloody shovel and be honest – Lightrooms demosaicing algorithm is in need of an overhaul. And why something we have to pay for uses a methodology worse than something we get for free, God only knows.
It’s a common problem in Lightroom, and it’s the single biggest reason why, for example, landscape exposure blends using luminosity masks fail to work quite as smoothly as you see demonstrated on the old Tube of You.
If truth be told – and this is only my opinion – Lightroom is by no means the best raw file processor in existence today.
I say that with a degree of reservation though, because:
It’s very user friendly
It’s an excellent DAM (digital asset management) tool, possibly the best.
On the surface, it only shows its problems with very high contrast edges.
As a side note, my Top 4 raw converters/processors are:
Iridient Developer
Raw Therapee
Capture One Pro
Lightroom
Iridient is expensive and complex – but if you shoot Fuji X-Trans you are crazy if you don’t use it.
Raw Therapee is very complex (and slightly ‘clunky’ on Mac OSX) but it is very good once you know your way around it. And it’s FREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Iridient and RT have zero DAM capability that’s worth talking about.
Capture One Pro is a better raw converter on the whole than Lightroom, but it’s more complex, and its DAM structure looks like it was created by crack-smoking monkeys when you compare it to the effective simplicity of Lightroom.
If we look at Lightroom as a raw processor (as opposed to raw converter) it encourages the user to employ ‘recovery’ in shadow and highlight areas.
Using BOTH can cause halos along high contrast edges, and edges where high frequency detail sits next to very low frequency detail of a contrasting colour – birds in flight against a blue sky spring to mind.
Why do I keep ‘banging on’ about edges?
Because edges are critical – and most of you guys ‘n gals hardly ever look at them close up.
All images contain areas of high and low frequency detail, and these areas require different process treatments, if you want to obtain the very best results AND want to preserve the ability to print.
Cleanly defined edges between these areas allow us to use layer masks to separate these areas in an image, and obtain the selective control.
Clean inter-tonal boundaries also allow us to separate shadows, various mid tone ranges, and highlights for yet more finite control.
Working on 16 bit images (well, 15 bit plus 1 level if truth be told) means we can control our adjustments in Photoshop within a range of 32,768 tones. And there is no way in hell that localised adjustments in Lightroom can be carried out to that degree of accuracy – fact.
I’ll let you in to a secret here! You all watch the wrong stuff on YouTube! You sit and watch a video by God knows what idiot, and then wonder why what you’ve just seen them do does NOT work for you.
That’s because you’ve not noticed one small detail – 95% of the time they are working on jpegs! And jpegs only have a tonal range of 256. It’s really easy to make luminosity selections etc on such a small tonal range work flawlessly. You try the same settings on a 16 bit image and they don’t work.
So you end up thinking it’s your fault – your image isn’t as ‘perfect’ as theirs – wrong!
It’s a tale I hear hundreds of times every year when I have folk on workshops and 1to1 tuition days. And without fail, they all wish they’d paid for the training instead of trying to follow the free stuff.
You NEVER see me on a video working with anything but raw files and full resolution 16 bit images.
My only problem is that I don’t ‘fit into’ today’s modern ‘cult of personality’!
Most adjustments in Lightroom have a global effect. Yes, we have range masks and eraser brushes. But they are very poor relations of the pixel-precise control you can have in Photoshop.
Lightroom is – in my opinion of course – becoming polluted by the ‘one stop shop, instant gratification ideology’ that seems to pervade photography today.
Someone said to me the other day that I had not done a YouTube video on the new range masking option in Lightroom. And they are quite correct.
Why?
Because it’s a gimmick – and real crappy one at that, when compared to what you can do in Photoshop.
Photoshop is the KING of image manipulation and processing. And that is a hard core, irrefutable fact. It has NO equal.
But Photoshop is a raster image editor, which means it needs to be fed a diet of real pixels. Raw converters like Lightroom use ‘virtual pixels’ – in a manner of speaking.
And of course, Lightroom and the CameraRaw plug in for Photoshop amount to the same thing. So folk who use either Lightroom or Photoshop EXCLUSIVELY are both suffering from the same problems – if they can be bothered to look for them.
It Depends on the Shot
The landscape image is by virtue, a low ISO, high resolution shot with huge depth of field, and bags of high frequency inter-tonal detail that needs sharpening correctly to its very maximum. We don’t want to sharpen the sky, as it’s sharp enough through depth of field, as is the water, and we require ZERO sharpening artifacts, and no noise amplification.
If we utilise the same sharpening workflow on the center image, then we’ll all get our heads kicked in! No woman likes to see their skin texture sharpened – in point of fact we have to make it even more unsharp, smooth and diffuse in order to avoid a trip to our local A&E department.
The cheeky Red Squirrel requires a different approach again. For starters, it’s been taken on a conventional ‘wildlife camera’ – a Nikon D4. This camera sensor has a much lower resolution than either of the camera sensors used for the previous two shots.
It is also shot from a greater distance than the foreground subjects in either of the preceding images. And most importantly, it’s at a far higher ISO value, so it has more noise in it.
All three images require SELECTIVE sharpening. But most photographers think that global sharpening is a good idea, or at least something they can ‘get away with’.
If you are a photographer who wants to do nothing else but post to Facebook and Flickr then you might as well stop reading this post. Good luck to you and enjoy your photography, but everything you read in this post, or anywhere on this blog, is not for you.
But if you want to maximize the potential of your thousands of pounds worth of camera gear, and print or sell your images, then I hate to tell you, but you are going to have to LEARN STUFF.
Photoshop is where the magic happens.
As I said earlier, Photoshop is a raster image processor. As such, it needs to be fed an original image that is of THE UTMOST QUALITY. By this I mean a starting raw file that has been demosaiced and normalized to:
Contain ZERO demosaic artifacts of any kind.
Have the correct white and black points – in other words ZERO blown highlights or blocked shadows. In other words, getting contrast under control.
Maximize the midtones to tease out the highest amount of those inter-tonal details, because this is where your sharpening is going to take place.
Contain no more sharpening than you can get away with, and certainly NOT the amount of sharpening you require in the finished image.
With points 1 thru 3 the benefits should be fairly obvious to you, but if you think about it for a second, the image described is rather ‘flattish – looking’.
But point 4 is somewhat ambiguous. What Adobe-philes like to call capture or input sharpening is very dependent on three variables:
Sensor megapixels
Demosaic effeciency
Sharpening method – namely Unsharp Mask or Deconvolution
The three are inextricably intertwined – so basically it’s a balancing act.
To learn this requires practice!
And to that end I’m embarking on the production of a set of videos that will help you get to grips with the variety of sharpening techniques that I use, and why I use them.
I’ll give you fair warning now – when finished it will be neither CHEAP nor SHORT, but it will be very instructive!
I want to get it to you as soon as possible, but you wouldn’t believe how long tuition videos take to produce. So right now I’m going to say it should be ready at the end of February or early March.
UPDATE:Â The new course is ready and on sale now, over on my digital download site.
The Importance of Finished Image Previsualization (Patreon Only).
For those of you who haven’t yet subscribed to my YouTube channel, I uploaded a video describing how I shot and processed the Lone Tree at Llyn Padarn in North Wales the other day.
You can view the video here:
Image previsualization is hugely important in all photography, but especially so in landscape photography.
Most of us do it in some way or other. Looking at images of a location by other photographers is the commonest form of image previsualization that I come across amongst most hobby photographers – and up to a point, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong in that – as long as you put your own ‘slant’ on the shot.
But relying on this method alone has one massive Achilles Heel – nature does not always ‘play nice’ with the light!
You set off for your chosen location with a certain knowledge that the weather forecast is correct, and you are guaranteed to get the perfect light for the shot you have in mind.
Three hours later, you arrive at your destination, and the first thought that enters your head is “how do I blow up the Met Office” – how could they have lied to me so badly?
If you rely solely on ‘other folks images’ for what your shot should look like, then you now have a severe problem. Nature is railing against your preconceptions, and unless you make some mental modifications then you are deep into a punch-up with nature that you will never win.
Just such an occasion transpired for me the other day at Llyn Padarn in North Wales.
The forecast was for low level cloud with no wind, just perfect for a moody shot of the famous Lone Tree on the south shore of the lake.
So, arriving at the location to be greeted by this was a surprise to say the least:
This would have been disastrous for some, simply because the light does not comply with their initial expectations. I’ve seen many people get a ‘fit of the sulks’ when this happens, and they abandon the location without even getting out of the car.
Alternatively, there are folk who will get their gear set up and make an attempt, but their initial disappointment becomes a festering ‘mental block’, and they cannot see a way to turn this bad situation into something good.
But, here’s the thing – there is no such thing as a bad situation!
There are however, multiple BAD REACTIONS to a situation.
And every adverse reaction has its roots buried in either:
Rigid, inflexible preconceptions.
Poor understanding of photographic equipment and post-processing.
Or both!
On this occasion, I was expecting a rather heavy, flat-ish light scenario; but was greeted by the exact opposite.
But instead of getting ‘stroppy about it’, experience and knowledge allow me to change my expectation, and come up with a new ‘finished image previsualization’ on the fly so to speak.
Instead of the futility of trying to produce my original idea – which would never work out – I simply change my image previsualization, based on what’s in front of me.
It’s then up to me to identify what I need to do in order to bring this new idea to fruition.
The capture workflow for both ‘anticipated’ and ‘reality’ would involve bracketing due to excessive subject brightness range, but there the similarity ends.
The ‘anticipated’ capture workflow would only require perhaps 3 or 4 shots – one for the highlights, and the rest for the mid tones and shadow detail.
But the ‘reality’ capture workflow is very different. The scene has massive contrast and the image looks like crap BECAUSE of that excessive contrast. Exposing for the brightest highlights gives us a very dark image:
But I know that the contrast can be reduced in post to give me this:
So, while I’m shooting I can previz in my head what the image I’ve shot will look like in post.
This then allows me to capture the basic bracket of shots to capture all my shadow and mid tone detail.
If you watch the video, you’ll see that I only use TWO shots from the bracket sequence to produce the basic exposure blend – and they are basically 5 stops apart. The other shots I use are just for patching blown highlights.
Because the clouds are moving, the sun is in and out like a yo-yo. Obviously, when it’s fully uncovered, it will flare across the lens. But when it is partially to fully covered, I’m doing shot after shot to try and get the best exposures of the reflected highlights in the water.
By shooting through a polarizer AND a 6 stop ND, I’m getting relatively smooth water in all these shots – with the added bonus of blurring out the damn canoeists!
And it’s the ‘washed out colour, low contrast previsualization’ of the finished image that is driving me to take all the shots – I’m gathering enough pixel data to enable me to create the finished image without too much effort in Lightroom or Photoshop.
Anyway, go and watch the video as it will give you a much better idea of what I’m talking about!
But remember, always take your time and try reappraise what’s in front of you when the lighting conditions differ from what you were expecting. You will often be amazed at the awesome images you can ‘pull’ from what ostensibly appears to be a right-off situation.
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
As I said way back in my in-depth review of this awesome bit of kit, I was originally interested in the Astro photography potential of the Irix 15mm Blackstone/Firefly lens.
Monday night – 24th July – saw myself and Rik heading for Snowdonia in North Wales, and in particular the small wooden foot bridge over Afon Idwal, just a ways up the old miners track behind Ogwen Cottage.
The weather forecast was for clear skies, and Google Earth in conjunction with Stellarium and TPE told me that around 11 pm the Milky Way would be over said small wooden bridge. So we packed a few things and off we toddled.
IMPORTANT: THERE IS NO SHARPENING ON THIS IMAGE. All 33 image frames (32 light frames plus the long exposure frame) had ZERO sharpening applied during processing. The Milky Way towers high in the night sky over the mountains of Snowdonia in North Wales. A small wooden footbridge over the rushing waters of the River Idwal forms the focal point.
The place was rammed with people coming down off the mountains – and a pile going up as well – as it transpires, they were having an all-night party on the shores of Llyn Idwal higher up the track – nutters!
The Welsh midges were out in force and doing their best impression of man-eating tigers and guess who forgot to bring the mozy repellent!
The composition I was after entailed me setting up on the path and shooting straight along the bridge, so I set the camera up with the Irix 15mm Blackstone set on the infinity click stop and the focus locked with the locking ring. I knew from all the testing I’d done that this would give my tack sharp stars even with the aperture wide open and that stopping down to f6.3 or narrower would render a sharp foreground to around 1.5 metres.
The ‘plan’ was to shoot a foreground image at low ISO during twilight in order to save having to shoot a long exposure with LENR under total darkness – and that’s exactly what I did, then it all went a bit ‘Pete Tong’!
What caused the confusion was my Photpills app on my iPhone telling me that the Milky Way was already where I needed it to be in about another hour and a half, so the whole shot was not going to work – bear in mind the sky is still too bright to see any stars.
So like an idiot I believed it and moved the camera, looking for another composition that would work – as it transpired a fatal mistake.
A lesson for the future – if a mobile app does not match up with Stellarium, the Photographers Ephemeris and Google Earth try restarting the phone and re-calibrating the compass!!
After 45 minutes of struggling to find another composition using the new projected position of the Milky Way in the growing darkness, I looked up and saw the Summer Triangle – in exactly the position that my original plan had calculated.
After a short bout of self-directed expletives based around men’s dangly-bits and the act of procreation, I got the camera back in something approximating its original position, but of course, the original framing would be ‘off’ so my initial low ISO foreground shot was useless.
Starting over, I set the camera to shoot 32 frames in continuous low and used a locking cable release to shoot rapid sequences of 32 frames – an easy way to do the job that does not always work too well with a big zoom like the Nikon 14-24, or Canon 16-35 – occasionally you can get ‘mirror vibration’ effects on your images. But with a short-barreled prime like the Irix 15mm, this is not a problem I ever see.
By around 11.30pm I’m happy with the sky shots I have in the can, but now comes the long exposure foreground shot.
I’m actually dreading this shot as it’s going to take a long time to produce and I’m anticipating some of those aforementioned party goers to come wandering back down the track with head-torches waving around all over the place.
I opted for a 10-minute exposure with long exposure noise reduction enabled in the camera – so the shot is going to take 20 minutes to produce.
Twenty minutes later, the shot on the back of the camera indicated that in reality, it needed around another stop and a half-ish of exposure time. I’d got away with no torches wandering through this shot, but if I did another, longer one I was certain it would get ruined.
So I shot 32 dark frames and another couple of 32 frame sequences, then we packed the gear away and headed for home.
The total number of frames for this shot with the Irix 15mm was 85 and comprise of:
32 light frames 6secs @f4 6400 ISO
32 dark frames 6secs @f4 6400 ISO
1x 600sec @f6.3 400 ISO – (no need for re-focus so no focus breathing problems).
Made from 32 images with 32 dark frames and a flat-field frame by Starry Landscape Stacker 1.4.0. Click to view full size.
As you can see from the image above, stars are tack sharp (even with no sharpening added in post), and coma is minimal. And most importantly there is plenty of colour in those fainter stars – something that is a little harder to achieve with the ubiquitous Zeiss glass.
I could improve the image quality even further by correct that minimal coma in Photoshop with a custom brush and the clone tool, and make a star mask and reduce the noise even more (see my training videos if you want to know more!).
And of course, if I hadn’t had the wobble over composition then perhaps I would have ended up with something like this:
Or something in between the two!
But either way, the session proved to equal or exceed my expectations of this Irix 15mm lens capabilities.
So, am I impressed by how this lens performs under Astro photography conditions? You bet I am!
I’ll never use my trusty Nikon 14-24 for Astro photography ever again as far as I can see – why would I…
Sharp focus with the Irix 15mm is so easy to achieve, and there is now no reason to re-focus on closer foreground objects – all I need to do is stop down the aperture a bit. So that’s all those focus-breathing errors out the window for starters.
Then, there is less coma, less chromatic aberration and a lot less barrel distortion.
When fumbling around in the dark, personally I think it would be good if Irix could increase the diameter of the focus locking ring, but that’s such a minor point it’s only just barely worth a mention.
What’s next?
Irix have just sent me a set of their new Edge 95mm screw-in filters, including 10x and 7x ND filters and the circular polarizer – so some daytime landscapes seem to be in order over the next couple of weeks.
I just wish I’d had the 11mm for the shot of the Milky Way!
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
For a while now I’ve been toying with the idea of running landscape workshops in Iceland.
Now you know by now I NEVER try and sell anything I haven’t ‘done’ myself first, so the last Monday of February saw myself and Richard boarding an Easyjet Airbus at Manchester bound for Keflavik airport for something of a recce.
We had teamed up with the ‘oh-so-nice’ Malcolm Stott, a super guy who’s been traveling to Iceland as a naturalist and tour guide for nearly 50 years – what he doesn’t know about Iceland isn’t worth knowing!
Poor man – he had absolutely NO DAMNED IDEA what he’d let himself in for agreeing to take me and mini-me on a whistle-stop tour of the land of fire and ice.
Poor Malcolm – look at him, taken on the last full day we were there – he’s definitely suffering from PTSD!
With all my experience in Norway I thought I’d got a pretty good idea what to expect – how freaking wrong can one be!
We piled into Keflavik while it was still daylight, got picked up by Malcom in our hired Toyota 4×4 and headed straight for the Northern Light Inn where we’d be staying for one night before heading up to the North east region and Myvatn.
Cracking hotel – and just 2 hours after Easyjets rubber hit the Icelandic tarmac we were out taking pictures of the Aurora:
A lone photographer (it’s Malcolm really!) stands beneath the Northern Lights just south of Keflavik in Iceland.
Aurora Pano over a snow-covered lava field. The light pollution on the right is the town Keflavik, and the horizon is still lit by the afterglow of sunset.
It was while at this location that Richard and I got our first taste of the scourge of serious photography in Iceland – bloody tourists!
They walk in front of you waving torches and camera-phones without so much as an excuse me – inconsiderate bastards – I could have got a lot of satisfaction had I thought of adding a Glock 19 to the kit !
So, lesson learned for the future – keep away from the tourist traps; or so we thought.
We moved on to a much more secluded location and a small frozen lake:
The Aurora Borealis lights up the night sky above a frozen lake in Iceland, with the moon reflected in the ice.
We got back to the hotel around midnight, Malcolm retired to his bed, but Rich and myself were doing it pro-style, downloading and backing up images and pinging a post up on Facebook. Coupled with a thirst for tea we didn’t see sleep until around 3am, which was far from ideal as we had a mammoth drive up to Myvatn the following morning.
I could do the drive myself in about 4 hours – but I’d lose my license and be bankrupted by speeding fines in under 2 hours – driving speed limits in Iceland are bloody awful if you are a UK driver!
The drive up to Myvatn was intense and non-stop, and we decided to stop at the iconic falls of Godafoss – big mistake – tourist alarm!
A panoramic winter view of the iconic waterfall of Godafoss in North Eastern Iceland.
The wind was off the falls so we had problems with spray on lenses, so close work with a wide angle was impractical to say the least – so a further PoV and a pano approach with a longer lens was called for.
Once the vista view was done we waited for the sun to get low enough for the God Rays to start showing in the huge curtain of spray that we were ‘blessed with’ – the results certainly had the throng of Chinese tourists totally engrossed:
Landscape photography is all about analyzing what you can see, and when you struggle to make the standard view work for you you MUST find something in the detail – and detail can be shot no matter how much of an ‘epic fail’ the scene appears to be. Yes, the two shots above might not be your ‘cup of tea’, but I know someone will like them and make a purchase! And we’ve got dozens of them – so it’s not a fail!
KNOW THY MARKET PLACE KIDS!
And NEVER go out on a landscape session without a short to medium telephoto – EVER!
In the evening, after checking in to the Hotel Sel at Myvatn and getting over the shock of the smell of the water coming from the taps in our bathroom (oh my God it was bad!) we were treated to another display of Aurora that must have peaked at Kp7 around midnight:
The Aurora will just sit there in the sky looking awesome.
Then suddenly it will split the sky at lightning speed, break apart and dance around all over the place.
Then it’ll slow down and start to fade, perhaps coming back later – or perhaps not!.
Big Kp number displays are incredible to witness and in truth stills cannot do it justice – you have to stop taking pictures and just look up in awe – and I guarantee it’ll make you painfully aware of your own insignificance……it makes you feel like what you really are, less than a blip on the screen.
We had the opportunity the photograph the Aurora on 5 of the 7 nights we were in Iceland – we certainly filled our boots with it I can tell you.
One of Rich’s many Aurora shots done with the D4 and the super-sweet Nikon 18-35mm – actually a far more forgiving combo than the 14-24mm+D800E combo I was using.
The daylight opportunities in and around the Myvatn area where far too numerous for us to really do them justice in the time we had available, but we did our best:
The Hell-Hole of Námafjall Hverir
Not the best time of year to photograph this area – covered in snow, the vivid colours of the ground are hidden for the most part. But it still feels like the gateway to Hell, and the over-powering sulphur-laden atmosphere leaves a lasting impression – especially when combined with the tap water back at the hotel.
But if you want to be in an extreme volcanic area you have to take it all in your stride.
A panoramic view of a collapsed steam vent or fumerole at Namafjall in Iceland.
The Namafjall fumeroles make a constant deafening roar as they pump tonnes of high pressure sulfurous steam into the atmosphere.
Now here’s the thing; sulfur, air and water go together to make sulfuric acid, especially when we take into account the additions of extreme heat and pressure – nice!
Tourists again find this spot a big draw – having a good time standing warming their dumb asses against the fumeroles and trying to hover their bloody DJI Phantoms in the acidic gas clouds!
Really, to get great images here you need to pitch up in the autumn, late in an evening when they’ve all buggered off in their coaches back to their hotels.
And before anyone says ‘they’ve as much right to be there as you Andy’ – NO they haven’t, not when they show such disrespect to the landscape and environment – you should see the litter they drop for starters…..bastards….grrrrrrr.
I was stood talking to a Norwegian geologist while at Namafjall, who told me in a very matter-of-fact manner that the magma was rising and was only around 800 meters below my feet……’great’ says I, ‘do all these Muppets know this?’
‘The tour leader on the coach tells them, but they either don’t listen or are too stupid to comprehend it’ says he.
I can’t blame the Icelandic people for letting them in – get their money before they get burnt to a crisp here, or drowned at Vik!
Within this close up of a geothermal pool in Iceland there is sulfur, sulfur-eating bacteria, boiling mud and ice. Getting this shot made me go light-headed through lack of breathable air!
Major Geological Landmarks
The Mid Atlantic Tectonic Plate Boundary – it’s Hand of God time!
Just over a mile up the road from Namafjall is this rather innocuous looking feature:
The mid Atlantic ridge tectonic boundary at its highest elevation above the sea bed in Iceland. The European tectonic plate is on the right of the image and the North American tectonic plate is on the left.
But innocuous and insignificant it certainly is not!
Coachloads of tourists drive straight past it never giving it a second thought. I’d love to photograph this from the other side with the sun setting in the gap – another shot for autumn.
The Tephra and Pseudo Craters of Myvatn
Hverfjall Tephra Crater
The geological processes which formed these two landmarks boggle the mind – both features result from a meeting of copious amounts of ground water and boggy ground and even more copious amounts of hot moving lava flow. Put simply – you just wouldn’t want to be there at the time, believe me!
I’d been looking at the Hverfjall Crater for two days trying to find somewhere to plonk the tripod to get the shot I had in my head. And towards the end of Thursday I found it, quite by accident, down a track leading to a stuffed bird museum (don’t ask!).
Stunning winter light and a pancake flat snow field, kill the saturation in post – yes sir thanks muchly. Out comes to 70-200 f2.8 and just wait for the sunlight to pop from behind the cloud.
Looking towards the huge Hverfjall Crater tephra cone across a snow covered Lake Myvatn in Iceland. The houses on the far side of the lake give some scale.
The big thing that got me was the light quality, which is something you can only get at high latitudes – it’s a landscapers dream.
About two hours later I found the location to shoot the next image, a group of pseudo craters around Lake Myvatn – the sunlight gave some cracking top lighting to this landmark feature.
Winter snow and stunning light over pseudo craters or rootless cones in the north eastern region of Iceland. They were created by a huge steam explosion through an advancing lava flow as it moved across wetland bog around 2500 years ago.
And we have to have a colourful one of the lake don’t we:
Lake Myvatn at daybreak.
Friday morning saw us making the next big move down to Skaftafell, and because the highland road was closed because of the snow, we had to do the N1 eastern coastal route. Eleven hours driving, but a stunning drive it was – the light over the highland plain and the immense vistas of the Eastern Coast blew me away.
The daybreak light over the North East Highland Plain was breath-taking. Shot with the D500 and 18-35mm combo.
View across the mouth of the Faskrudsfjordur fjord and Skrudur island.
Looking south towards the mountain range at the mouth of Stodvarfjordur on the eastern coast of Iceland.
Looking south east from the inner end of Berufjord, again on Icelands unvisited eastern coast.
Two things struck myself and Rich on this mammoth coastal drive.
You can’t help but ‘pano everything’ because the vistas are just too epic.
Why is there no one here?
Skaftafell, Jokulsarlon & Vik
Checked into the Skaftafell Hotel and YAY – no sulfur in the water!
No way was I paying the price to eat in the evening here – so it’s over the road to the N1 services for the best meal I’ve had in ages – all you can eat buffet of breaded pork medallions, spring rolls, potatoes gratin and pepper sauce – under £30 for me and Rich – we were stuffed!
Aurora photography on this Friday night and small hours of Saturday morning came in two parts.
The hotel lies at the foot of two huge glaciers coming down from the huge Vatnajokull ice cap. There’s something of a penalty to pay for being near the foot of a glacier, and that penalty is a katabatic wind.
Holy Crap! They come from nowhere, are so cold you can’t believe it, go so fast they’ll rip the clothes from you back, and then disappear as fast as they arrive.
Here’s one caught by Rich, on its way down the glacier to give us a battering:
You can see the katabatic ‘cell’ approaching the foot of the glacier – it’s the gray ‘cloud’ full of fine ice particles which wasn’t there 30 seconds before!
Another katabatic cell rushes down the glacier but we are too far away to feel it’s effects – thank God!
We gave up after 30 minutes and half a dozen batterings, and went back to the hotel – and waited….
And sure enough things calmed down and the skies cleared around 1am on Saturday morning, and we were off out again. A different look to the lights this time around – very active but diffused:
Three shot panorama – D800E+14-24 f2.8 @ 14mm
Fjallajokull Glacier.
Above is a pano of the Fjallajokull Glacier, which creeps its way down from the main Vatnajokull ice cap.
This is 19 vertical frames stitched together for 49000 pixels – and there’s another three rows to go on this top and bottom, but it keeps making my Mac fall over when I try to put it together!!
Spot the lunatic tourist bottom right – he’s good for scaling. We were taking bets on whether he’d fall in or not, and how long he’d survive if he did – what a prick.
To ND or not ND – that is the question? Answer – do both! A large chunk of blue glacial ice being battered in the surf on the western black sand beach at Jokulsarlon.
A macro panoramic view of the intricate surface texture of glacial ice washed ashore on the beach at Jokulsarlon in Iceland.
Looking up towards the immense icy peaks of the western end of Vatnajokull. This was shot with the camera and me jammed in the gap of the open rear door of our 4×4 – trying to keep the camera steady during a massive katabatic blast.
I also got the opportunity to take one of those super-minimalist abstract landscapes:
Bad weather from the North Atlantic approaching the coast of Southern Iceland, viewed over a perfectly flat sheet of snow-covered ice. This is a genuine image not a composite.
Eat your heart out Rhine 2 – hey, a bloke can dream can’t he?
Later the Aurora paid us another visit:
One from Rich on the D4 + 18-35mm combo.
Sunday was a strange day. Lack of sleep was getting to both of us and Malcolm too, but we headed for the East Beach at Vik for the iconic sea stacks:
A panoramic view of the iconic landmark and popular tourist destination of the Sea Stacks at Vik on Iceland. The shot is taken from the quieter and less visited Eastern Black Sand Beach nest to the village of Vik.
There’s a damn fine looking landscape here if the tide was a bit further in and there were NO people or footprints! Rich and Malcolm working hard.
Then we moved on to Skogafoss Falls but it was rammed to bursting with idiots having a laugh falling over – I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a crowd.
I was standing in the river with a standard composition ready to go when a guy wades out in front of me, sits on my feature foreground rock and starts drinking a bottle of beer. Then his mate starts taking pictures of him. I ‘nicely’ asked them what their game was and their reply was they were doing a series of shots with ‘beer boy’ drinking a beer in the dodgiest situation they could find at various landmark sites around the world.
WTF????
I just nodded and quietly left the river, packed up and went back to the car park before I ended up doing a stretch for murder…
So we drove on a few hundred yards and left the vehicle, having decided to walk up to the hidden waterfall of Kvernufoss:
The waterfall of Kvernufoss which is hidden at the end of a small narrow valley near the larger and more visited Skogafoss falls on the southern coast of Iceland.
What a stunning little hidden gem this fall is, it would be nice to go back in the autumn and get behind the fall curtain!
We left Kvernufoss for the long drive back to the Northern Light Hotel for our last night in Iceland, but we had not gone very far – Holtsos actually – when we were greeted by a view of the most magnificent sunset sky over the Westman Islands:
The sun sets behind the Vestmannaeyjar or Westman Island chain off the coast of southern Iceland.
Here’s a wider pano with a rather annoying drone operator in the bottom of the frame to add some scale, and the rocks in the lake removed:
Click me!
Then another minimalist shot emerged in front of me:
As the sun sets in the west, the view south east across a partially frozen lake reveals delicate pastel shades of pink and blue in the sky and its reflection in the ice and open water of the lake.
No Aurora on Sunday night, the Valkeries obviously felt they had shown us enough, so it was a case of a few large mugs of the fabulous hot chocolate, a bit of packing, a shower, some more hot choc and BED.
Our plane wasn’t due to leave until 7.40pm Monday so we had some hours to fill, and our plan was to have a drive down to the Sea Stacks at Reykjanesta. The sky was grey and there was a bit of a ‘blow’ on the go so things looked promising.
On the way I made Rich take one for the team:
Great way to start the morning – sulfuric acid shower. He’s a good lad!
Reykjanesta is a stunning place, and also a place of great sadness – and a bucket-load of shame too. This small bit of coastline was famous as the breeding colony for the Great Auk. But their favorite breeding island vanished in a puff of volcanic action in 1830. That was on top of their slaughter by British sailors in 1808.
Those few that remained took refuge on the small basalt rock island of Eldey which lies on the horizon about 15km offshore. But on the 3rd of June 1844 four Icelandic fishermen set sail for the island to secure a specimen Auk for a collector.
What they found when they got there is unclear, but suffice to say when they left Eldey the worlds very last pair of breeding Great Auks were killed and their single egg smashed.
And folk wonder why I hate the majority of human-kind.
As a memorial there is a near 6 foot bronze Auk set into the cliff top and it gazes out in the exact line of sight to Eldey – it brings a lump to your throat for sure:
The sea was like a washing machine gone mad with 20 to 30 foot breakers smashing into the sea stacks:
It wasn’t exactly fun, but it was exciting (apologies for any language you might have heard!) and I knew we had an escape route from this cave under the cliff – but we were on the ragged edge of safety!
The pics were well worth the effort:
The Sea Stacks at Reykjanesta on the southern tip of the Reykjavik peninsula in Iceland. Large waves pound this beach constantly, making it a very dangerous place to visit if you are not careful.
The Sea Stacks at Reykjanesta.
That’s about it then, afterwards it was off back to Keflavik airport and a delayed flight back home for tea and medals thanks to a strike by French ATC.
I’m going to be organizing landscape workshops to Iceland in 2020. I haven’t formulated them yet, but they will most likely be in September 2020 and March 2021. They will be formatted in such a way as to steer clear of the main tourist traps and concentrate more on locations that are not quite so well known.
I have had a lot of interest in these so far, but if it’s something you fancy just drop me a line.
Happy photography everyone, hope you enjoyed this post!
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
Everyone likes a nice moody sunset, but great images await those camera operators that start shooting after most folks have started packing their gear away and heading home.
For me, twilight is where the fun starts.
The rock stack lying off the boulder-strewn beach of Porth Saint, Rhoscolyn Head, Anglesey.
The low light levels on a scene once ‘civil daylight’ has ended mean you get awesome light with lower contrast shadows, subtle skies, and nice long shutter speeds for dreamy water effects without needing expensive 10 stop ND filters.
However, that awesome light vanishes very quickly, so you have to be ready! I waited nearly 90 minutes for the shot above.
But that time was spent doing ‘dry runs’ and rehearsals – once the composition was set how I wanted it, the foreground was outside of DoF, so I knew I needed to shoot a focus stack as well as an exposure blend…mmmm….yummy!
Once we have made the long transition from civil daylight end to astronomical daylight end the fun really begins though.
Astro Landscape Photography
The Milky Way over the derelict buildings of Magpie Mine in Derbyshire.
Astro landscape photography, or wide field astro as it’s sometimes known, is not as difficult as a lot of photographers imagine.
But astro landscape photography IS very demanding of your familiarity with your gear, and will require some expenditure on additional bits of kit if disappointment is to be avoided.
Here’s the kit I usually venture out at night with:
Dew Heater Band (A).
An essential bit of kit for astro landscape photography – it’s amazing how rapidly a lot of lenses, especially super-wides like the Nikon 14-24 f2.8 encounter a problem with dew at night. This will in effect fog the front element, starting at its centre and if left unchecked it can spread across the entire face of the lens.
Heating the lens front sufficiently to keep its temperature above the dew point for your current location and time will prevent a ruined session – don’t leave home without one!
This dew heater is powered by a battery (C) via a dew heater controller (D) with is basically a simple rotary rheostat which controls the level of current driving the heater band.
I use mine at about 75% of ‘full chat’ and it seems to work just fine.
A final note on dew heater bands – these are designed for use by those strange folk who spend hours behind telescopes. They tape the bands in place and leave them there. As photographers we need to add or remove them as needed. The bands can prove fragile, need I say more?
Yes, it pays to carry a spare, and it pays to treat them with care and not just throw them in the camera bag – I’m on band number 3 with number 4 in reserve!
Intervalometer (B).
You will need to shoot a long exposure of you scene foreground, slightly re-focuused closer to you, at a much lower ISO, and perhaps at a slightly narrower aperture; this shot might well be 20 minutes long or more and with long exposure NR engaged to produce a black subtraction.
Yes, a lockable cable release and the timer on your watch will do the job, hence (F) and (G) in case (B) stops working!
But an intervalometer will make this easier – as long as you’ve read the instructions..doh!
If you want to shoot star trails the external intervalometer is vastly superior to your cameras built in one. That’s because the in-camera intervalometer on nearly all cameras except the Nikon D810A is limited to a 30 second shutter speed.
An hours worth of star rotation is barely enough:
But at 30 seconds shutter speed you will end up with 120 frames at fairly high ISO.
Far better to shoot at ‘bulb’ with a 5 minute exposure and lower ISO – then you’ll only have 12 frames – your computer with thank you for the lower number when it comes to stacking the shots in Photoshop.
There is also another problem, for certain marks of Nikon cameras. The D800E that I use has a stupid cap on continuous shooting. The much touted method of setting the shutter to 30 seconds and putting the camera in continuous low speed shooting mode and locking the cable release button down does NOT work – it only allows you to take 100 frames then the camera just STOPS taking pictures.
But if you use an external intervalometer set to a 30 second exposure, continuous and just drop the camera in BULB and Single Shot then the D800E and its like will sit there and fill your cards up with frames.
Other Essentials.
Micro fibre cloths, bin liners and gaffer tape (B,I and J).
After a couple of hours of full darkness your gear (and I mean all of it) will most likely be wet with dew, especially here in the UK. Micro fibre cloths are great for getting the majority of this dampness off your camera gear when you put it away for the trip home.
Bin liners are great for keeping any passing rain shower off your camera gear when its set up – just drop one (opened of course) over your camera and tape it to the tripod legs with a bit of gaffer tape. Leave the dew heater ON.
Also, stick the battery supply in one – rain water and 13 volts DC at 4000MAh don’t mix well.
Photopills on your iPhone (G) is incredibly useful for showing you where the Milky Way is during that extended period between civil and astronomical daylight end. Being able to see it in relationship to your scene with the Night Augmented Reality feature cetainly makes shot composition somewhat easier.
Head Lamp (H) – preferably one which has a red light mode. Red light does not kill off your carefully tuned night vision when you need to see some camera setting control lever or button.
Accurate GPS positioner (K). Not entirely an ‘essential’ but it’s mighty useful for all sorts of reasons, especially when forward planning a shot, or getting to a set position in the dark.
The Milky Way towering over the National Coastwatch Institution (NCI) station at Rhoscolyn on Anglesey.
I love taking someone who’s never seen the Milky Way out at night to capture it with their own equipment – the constant stream of ‘WOWS’ makes me all warm ‘n fuzzy! This year has seen me take more folk out than ever; and even though we are going to loose the galactic centre in the next few weeks the opportunities for night photography get better as the nights grow longer.
The Milky Way over the derelict buildings of Magpie Mine in Derbyshire.
The Milky Way will still be a prominent feature in the sky until October, and will be in a more westerly position, so lots of great bays on the North Wales & Anglesey coast will come into their own as locations.
The Milky Way over the Afon Glaslyn Valley looking towards Beddgelert and Porthmadog. The patchy green colour of the sky is cause by a large amount of airglow, another natural phenomenon that very few people actually see.
And just look at that star detail:
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be putting together a training video title on processing astro landscape photography images, and if the next new moon phase at the end of this month comes with favorable weather I’m going to try and supplement these with a couple of practical shooting videos – so fingers crossed.
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
I really get a massive buzz from photographing the night sky – PROPERLY.
By properly I mean using your equipment to the best of its ability, and using correct techniques in terms of both ‘shooting’ and post processing.
The majority of images within the vast plethora of night sky images on Google etc, and methods described, are to be frank PANTS!
Those 800 pixel long-edge jpegs hide a multitude of shooting and processing sins – such as HUGE amounts of sensor noise and the biggest sin of all – elongated stars.
Top quality full resolution imagery of the night sky demands pin-prick stars, not trails that look like blown out sausages – unless of course, you are wanting them for visual effect.
Pin sharp stars require extremely precise MANUAL FOCUS in conjunction with a shutter speed that is short enough to arrest the perceived movement of the night sky across the cameras field of view.
They also demand that the lens is ‘shot’ pretty much wide open in terms of aperture – this allows the sensor to ‘see and gather’ as many photons of light from each point-source (star) in the night sky.
So we are in the situation where we have to use manual focus and exposure with f2.8 as an approximate working aperture – and high ISO values, because of the demand for a relatively fast shutter speed.
And when it comes to our shutter speed the much-vaunted ‘500 Rule’ needs to be consigned to the waste bin – it’s just not a good enough standard to work to, especially considering modern high megapixel count sensors such as Nikon’s D800E/D810/D810A and Canons 5DS.
Leaving the shutter open for just 10 seconds using a 14mm lens will elongate stars EVER SO SLIGHTLY – so the ‘500 Rule’ speed of 500/14 = 35.71 seconds is just going to make a total hash of things.
In the shot below; a crop from the image top left; I’ve used a 10 second exposure, but in preference I’ll use 5 seconds if I can get away with it:
WOW….look at all that noise…well, it’s not going to be there for long folks; and NO, I won’t make it vanish with any Noise Reduction functions or plugins either!
5 consecutive frames put through Starry Landscape Stacker – now we have something we can work with!
Download Starry Landscape Stacker from the App Store:
Huge amounts of ‘noise’ can be eradicated using Median Stacking within Photoshop, but Mac users can circumnavigate the ‘agro’ of layer alignment and layer masking by using this great ‘app’ Starry Landscape Stacker – which does all the ‘heavy lifting’ for you. Click the link above to download it from the App Store. Just ignore any daft iTunes pop-ups and click ‘View in Mac App Store’!
I have a demonstration of Median Stacking on my YouTube channel:
This video is best viewed on YouTube in full screen mode.
In a manner of speaking, the ‘shooting aspect’ of Milky Way/Night Sky/Wide-field Astro is pretty straight forward. You are working in between some very hard constraints with little margin for error.
The Earths rotation makes the stars track across our frame – so this dictates our shutter speed for any given focal length of lens – shorter focal length = longer shutter speed.
Sensor Megapixel count – more megs = shorter shutter speed.
We NEED to shoot with a ‘wide open’ aperture, so our ISO speed takes over as our general exposure control.
Focusing – this always seems to be the big ‘sticking point’ for most folk – and despite what you read to the contrary, you can’t reliably use the ‘hyperfocal’ method with wide open apertures – it especially will not work with wide-angle zoom lenses!
The Earths ‘seasonal tilt’ dictates what we can and can’t see from a particular latitude; and in conjunction with time of day, dictates the direction and orientation of a particular astral object such as the Milky Way.
Light pollution can mask even the cameras ability to record all the stars, and it effects the overall scene luminance level.
The position and phase of the moon – a full moon frequently throws far too much light into the entire sky – my advice is to stay at home!
A moon in between its last quarter and new moon is frequently diagonally opposite the Milky Way, and can be useful for illuminating your foreground.
And there are quite a few other considerations to take into account, like dew point and relative humidity – and of course, the bloody clouds!
The point I’m trying to make is that these shots take PLANNING.
Using applications and utilities like Stellarium and Photographers Ephemeris in conjunction with Google Earth has always been a great way of planning shots. But for me, the best planning aid is Photopills – especially because of its augmented reality feature. This allows you to pre-visualise your shot from your current location, and it will compute the dates and times that the shot is ‘on’.
Download Photopills from the App Store:
But it won’t stop the clouds from rolling in!
Even with the very best planning the weather conditions can ruin the whole thing!
I’m hoping that before the end of the year I’ll have a full training video finished about shooting perfect ‘wide field astro’ images – it’ll cover planning as well as BOTH shooting AND processing.
I will show you how to:
Effectively use Google Earth in conjunction with Stellarium and Photopills for forward planning.
The easiest way to ensure perfect focus on those stars – every time.
How to shoot for improved foreground.
When, and when NOT to deploy LONG EXPOSURE noise reduction in camera – black frame shooting.
How to process RAW files in Lightroom for correct colour balance.
How to properly use both Median Stacking in Photoshop and Starry Landscape Stacker to reduce ISO noise.
And much more!
One really useful FREE facility on the net is the Light Pollution Map website – I suggest using the latest 2015 VIIRIS overlay and the Bing Map Hybrid mode in order to get a rough idea of your foreground and the background light pollution effecting your chosen location.
Don’t forget – if you shoot vertical (portrait?) with a 14mm lens, the top part of the frame can be slightly behind you!
Become a patron from as little as $1 per month, and help me produce more free content.
Patrons gain access to a variety of FREE rewards, discounts and bonuses.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
