Jeff Offline Upload & Sell: On
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kylebarendrick wrote:
My experience with the 5DSR for astro led me to conclude that it rendered the sky and stars really nicely - just as you've shown above. However, when I've tried to pull detail out of the land, I've seen a lot of noise and color banding in the shadows. Your shot is helped by the fact that you left the ground as a silhouette.
I know this is a near-dead thread, but I've learned a lot about shooting astro with the 5Ds in the last year (maybe what I've learned can help another 5Ds astro shooter out), and categorically decrying it crappy for astro might be a bit off base (not you Kyle, the thread and internet in general). It was a challenging camera for daytime shooters when it first came out (bringing out deficiencies in lenses in daytime is notably harder than doing so at night!), and it certainly remains so for nighttime shooters, even now.
That being said, the 5Ds does indeed have fixed-pattern noise (like most Canon CMOS sensors), and the challenge is choosing the right ISO for the ambient shooting temperature (can you say: "Whack-A-Mole"?). I waited a year to capture a specific image of the Perseids in Utah and was confounded by very high nighttime temperatures that made the pattern noise in the image untenable. That prompted me to go through 3 years worth of astro images made with the 5Ds, and try to find a cause for the 'variable' results I seemed to get.
To make a long story short, if you are routinely getting fixed-pattern noise in your 5Ds astro images, you are likely shooting at too low an ISO (unless it's freezing out, 1600 is too low, I can assure you). Canon sensors have historically had nasty fixed pattern noise even at 'lower' ISOs (400, 800), it's just that it isn't usually revealed until you really, really push the shadows (which we obviously try/need not to do with daytime images). With astro, 99% of our images are in the shadows, and thus it is very easy to reveal the dark side of Canon's CMOS technology.
After going through my eval, I decided that I'll trade decreasing dynamic range (from raising ISO) for a decrease in fixed-pattern noise, any day of the week!
Do I want a 5DsII that has better DR and less pattern noise? Absolutely! But I'd bet that my 50MP 'noisy' Milky Way image is at least in the ballpark of a 20-30MP image from a modern-tech Canon sensor, given similar print size (not talking about deep-sky imaging here). Do I have to jump through hoops to get there? A bit, but very fine astro images can be made with a 5Ds, especially using a faster, less-wide lens, and stitching. Yes, it's a lot of work, but most good astro image are.
Cheers,
Jeff
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