NYFalls.com Talk

somehow the weather god surprised me the past weekend. All of a sudden it cleared up for two hours and I could take a few more Milky Way shots in Allegany SP.

Very cool Yvonne. What types of settings did you use to do this. A friend recently tried and he had alot of noise in his image.

Eddiebauer wrote:Very cool Yvonne. What types of settings did you use to do this. A friend recently tried and he had alot of noise in his image.

Eddie, I bought a new camera this year because of the noise with my old one.
I used a Nikon D7000 and it was a wonderful improvement compared to the shots I took before with my D90.
Full frame cameras work the best, friends of mine use them and I'm always impressed with the results.

My setting are the following:

I set my camera on M modus, choose the fastest aperture possible. I use a f2.8 Tokina lens
Wide Angle lenses work best.
Set the manual focus to infinity, shutter speed for 30 seconds.
Use the wired remote control and turn off image stabilization of your camera.

Usually I start with ISO 1600 on moon less nights, eventually going up to ISO 2500 or even 3200. The higher the ISO, the more noise you get.
On bright night with a moon I start with ISO 400 and eventually go up to ISO 800.
Take a few test shots and correct your setting if you like.


If you wanna take star trails, I use the 30 second shot method and lock the trigger of the remote. So the camera takes my shots while I do something else in between.
I later use software like star staxx or star trails(both freeware) to stack my shots together.

Star Trails look like that with the final result stacked together:




you can light the foreground of your composition using an external flash, campfire, whatever. Or like in my example a car was passing by and did the job

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wow Kelly, how do you get such a big moon?
Mine is always a tiny little spot, barely visible

Not my image. Just sharing someone else's work. See watermark.

The geminids were amazing last night. Managed to catch a couple. Of course all the bright ones fell outside of my sensor