Shooting the Night Sky
Finally! I spent the last week shooting the night sky.
It has been great to finally get out shooting the night sky and to work out how it should be done and also how not to do it!! I did some research online and looked through some of Karl Taylor's training DVD's to find some basic technical settings to work from. As with most of photography, once you're in the field you need to adapt to the environment and to your objective for taking a particular image.
I looked on Dave Morrow's website. He provides a fantastic tutorial and outlines exactly what is needed. His images are a wonderful inspiration and well worth a look!
While looking for a good set up for the time-lapse I fired off a few test shots to make sure I had the settings correct in the camera. The image below is a 30 second exposure shot at F2.8 at ISO 5000.
The key to night time shooting is to ensure the focus is spot on. In the image below I focussed the lens to infinity - on a Canon lens there is a small symbol to help out.
Unfortunately by the time I had finally managed to set up the time-lapse, which proved to be quite difficult in the near dark, I had somehow knocked the focus ring off infinity and the video below highlights this as nothing is in focus!!
Another thing I learnt was just how much light the moon generates. You can see just how bright the video became as the moon rose.
Not a brilliant video, but a good starting point and definitely some important must do's and don't do's were learnt.
--- Best watched full screen in HD ---
The video below was my second attempt. This time I got the infinity marker on the lens spot on. You'll see at 4 seconds into the clip the screen goes blurry, this is because I ended up with moisture on the lens from the dropping temperature. I didn't notice it for a while and not long after I cleared it the clouds came in and settled for the evening.
However, I am happy with the end result and it gives me a good idea how to get them spot on in the future.
--- Best watched full screen in HD ---
While my time-lapse videos weren't perfect I did manage to have much more joy with my still images. The best of which are below: