The Photography Topic

[Kev]

So for some time I've been wanting to try and get a picture of the Milky Way.
I treated myself to a new lens recently (Canon 16-35mm F2. which is useful for landscapes and also night shots thanks to the wide aperture.

Last night the weather forecast was good, and despite it being not far off a full moon, the moonrise wasn't until gone midnight so I thought I'd dash out to a new location I found just NW of Chipping Norton to give it a first try out and test some settings. The best time of year for the milky way is June/July so I knew I wouldn't get great images last night but it was a good start on where to be on the settings.

I set the camera up on my tripod in portrait mode to get the most sky possible and over the next couple of hours tried out some angles while it was still just about light.



which gives me this


.....then sit around for about an hour until it gets dark enough to see the stars.....

Here's Orion which was very prominent in the south last night with the characteristic three stars in a line for his belt, the slightly orangy glow of betelgeuse for the top left of the 'square' and sirius off to the left of the picture.



In order to see the cloud of the Milky Way you have to process the RAW images a LOT! Next time I go, another possibility is to take a series of 10 or 20 in the same place and stack them.

After a lot of fiddling, I managed to get these




and because it loops over the whole sky, I got some of it behind the trees to the north as well



All in all, despite being freezing!!!, it was quite a productive night.
Mostly these were ISO 1600, F2.8 and between 20 and 30 second exposures.

The amazing thing is that you only see that orange glow on the long exposure. You can't see it with the naked eye. That's coming from Swindon which is 30 miles away! The glow on the right of the north image is from Banbury about 12 miles away.

So I plan to go in to Wales for an attempt later in the year. I have a friend who lives on the far side of Swansea so to the south is just 25 miles of Bristol Channel darkness and to the north is 100 miles of Welsh mountains. My parents live in the north so a little 10 miles trip in to the hills there should be a good spot as well.

Not a bad start though.

[Kev]

Filthy Scirocco and Milky Way

[sted9923]

Fantastic photos Kev.

I tried the same kind of shots recently from home (near Manchester) with some pretty hopeless results... I blamed light pollution (nothing to do with the photographer of course!). We're off to North Wales soon where I'll be trying again.

[Kev]

Yeah light pollution's a real killer. I think my next go will have to be in Wales or maybe when the best part of the milky way is well above the horizon.

[skippy]

Briliant pictures Kev, absolutely awesome. Your right, light pollution is everywhere, seems to be no escape from it. There is a sports club a mile away from where I live and the floodlighting just bleaches out the night sky. The only answer is to go well out into the countryside, even then (as you found out), you get the distant glow of cities.

[BenBAC]

Kev, you mentioned you had to process these pics in RAW, I have never attempted to do this before is it tricky to do? I doubt you can create the same effect from the picture alone or am I wrong. I'm planning going up to Scotland this year and was thinking of treating myself to a new lens for my camera or my telescope, is the wide angle lens the one to go for to get these results (along with a good aperture).

[Kev]

When I started off I shot in jpg but after trying out RAW I won't be going back.

In a jpg you're much more limited in what you can adjust. Often changing one parameter affects the whole image rather than just that one condition.

You can get Adobe Lightroom 4 on a 30 day free trial. It's well worth trying out. Shoot a ocuple of pictures in jpg and then do the same ones in RAW and see which one you can post process to get the best result. It's much easier to adjust the raw file to get the best final image. LR4 has simple sliders for various things like highlights, shadows, contrast, exposure etc and it's a doddle to use.

Here's a before and after



A wide angle lens gives you a bigger field of view to get more in to the picture. Those images owe some of that to the wide angle and some to the aperture being a nice low F2.8. Yo can get the same results with F4 but you'll need a longer exposure or a higher ISO and you might start to get star trails if you make the exposure too long. One thing to do is search flickr for the lens you want and 'milky way' and you'll see some results with the same combination. Hopefully too they'll have the exif info telling you the exact settings for the shot.

[BenBAC]

Thanks for the info, so it's a bit of both then really, having the ability to have a play with the RAW image afterwards gives you greater control. Not done any RAW shooting because I haven't got a program to do the processing on, having said that my family have adobe photoshop on the family PC. Iv taken pics through my camera before of the night sky and have found I need to have the exposure reasonably long to get a good imagine but that does cause light trails. Good comparison on the processed imagine compared to the original it does make a whole lot of difference.

[Kev]

Photoshop should be able to process the RAW files. It's worth having a look at the LR4 demo though. It comes up on offer from time to time for around £65 on amazon. Well worth the money.

There's a rough formula for avoiding star trails. For full frame it's 600 divided by the focal length. For cropped it's 400.
So if you're on a cropped camera sensor with an 18-55mm lens on at the short end, 400/18=22s before the trails start to show. I'd probably do 20s to be on the safe side. That also means you'll need to whack the ISO up a bit to get more info in to the sensor, so try 6400 and see what they look like. But with RAW files you might get away with lower ISOs because you can drag the stars out of the file data, where you can't do that with a jpg file.

This is worth watching if you're going to try night shots
http://vimeo.com/16833554" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[BenBAC]

You never fail to answer :-D, top man.

Watched the video and it was very good, the location helped because of the snow, makes it easier to understand what to do.

I have had a nosey around at wide angle lenses, from 11mm up to 24mm and the prices are pretty high. The Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 looks a good buy but not sure of the brand, the nikons are all very good but are either f/4 or just way out of my price league.

[Kev]

You're welcome

Tokina are very well respected in the camera community from what I can tell and that 11-16mm gets good reviews.
Check this site out for good lens reviews
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Revi ... eview.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I certainly don't think you'd be disappointed by it.

[BenBAC]

Good review, might be able to capture good star images with this lens especially with it shooting f/2.8. Also would be good for the landscape shots up in bonny Scotland. Plus it's not a bad price either :-)

[easyrider]

A few from me, Nikon user.

[BenBAC]

Excellent pictures, particularly liking the night shots, lovely colour and very vibrant.

[Kev]

Yes nice shots. That pier is epic. Where's that?

[easyrider]

Hey, thanks.

The pier is down near Tilbury, on the Thames east of london. The top two are canvey island, just a few miles further down the road.

[Kev]

I went over to the Prescott Hill Climb today as it was practice for the first round of the championship.

I mainly wanted to have a practice myself, with low shutter speeds.

The first time I went there about 2-3 years ago, the best I could work with was 1/300th of a second.
A year later I was a bit better and able to score pretty well with 1/160th.
This time I thought I'd try 1/60th for most of the day. Not too bad. I took 750 pictures and ended up with about 10% that I'm quite happy with. I even managed a couple of 1/20th shots but they were a bit more hit and miss.
Finished the day in the pit area trying some 16mm f2.8 pictures for a bit of variety.

Full album here " onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Kev]

My work lasers!

[Kev]

I went to this at the weekend.

Took 1000 photos!! Managed to get it down to a decent number for a gallery

Full set are here
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Lovely classic Bugatti's and others










Beautiful blue carbon fibre on the Veyron

[ZephyR]

Some beautiful machines there. So be honest - how many cars did you pan going past until you got No 2 just right?
Excuse my ignorance but what are those little blades on the front of the cars?