eric hagemann wrote:
Gregg
Awsome work -- can you share EXIF
Cheers
Eric
Hey Eric,
A couple of things you need to know before shooting the Milky Way.
It shows up in the Northern hemisphere only in the Summertime. So, if you think you could go to Death Valley to take a nice shot when it's cool over there, it won't work. I thought that once but I learned that in the wintertime you need to go to Australia or New Zealand to take a clear shot of Milky Way. You can check the Internet for when and where the Milky Way will show up in the area you are at. My friend had an Android application for that (yes, there is one) and we were waiting for a good timing, which is everything in photography, to go to Joshua Tree and take a good shot at it. The sky has to be Moonless too. If the Moon is up the light from it will completely obscure faint light coming from the Milky Way. So two things now has to happen before you attempt shooting MW: Summertime and the Moonless sky.
Now, the actual photography. It's actually easy once you know the 500 rule. It won't work without knowing what that is. If you into night photography this is an essential rule to know and I'm going to spell it out for you here. You take a 500 number and divide it with the focal length of your lens. For night photography you want as wide as possible to expose for as long as possible. I had Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens so I set it at 14mm @ 2.8 (at such distance the lower the aperture the better) and 500/14 = 35.7. The 35.7 is the number in seconds you need to expose your 14 mm lens for to get the clear shot without seeing yet any movement of Earth. This is of course at most you can expose. If you expose for longer everything on the sky will be blurred, and instead of stars as dots you will get star trails. In this case you don't want that, of course.
That is it. I followed the 500 rule and a good timing.
For the arch.... My friend was hiding behind it and while the shutter was opened he triggered his flash once. This gave this depth effect. I also set my ISO to 1600 and set the Noise Reduction to off.
If you take a shot with these settings and your pic comes out too dark set your ISO to 3200. But I've never had to go higher than 1600.
Hope this helps you, and you all.
Great. I'll be happy to read it. By the way I'm a software engineer and I like programming a lot. So, what do you know... .I wrote an iPhone application that calculates the Sunset and Sunrise times for the given location in the World. In addition it calculates hyperfocal distance and depth of field for most common lenses and apertures. And, I made it available for free. I've just learned that it's already available on the Apple's App Store. It's called Photos (plural) Master and if you're interested and have an iPhone go ahead and get it.
Another thought Eric.... We can write something similar and add (or write from scratch another program) that calculates things like 500 rule or other things...
Any thoughts?
Gregg,
The math for the star motion is very simple -- easy to program. I am not sure of the need for an app for this -- in the article I give a simple table that talks about exposure time vs focal length which is always in my camera bag. To me its a once and done calculation. Although as an Engineer that formally wrote a lot of code for a living I can see the appeal of making an app
I gave up my iphone a while back and adopted android. I am a regular user of lighttrac (I think you can get this on the iphone) or tpe to do both the times and direction of sunrise/set and moonrise and set.
The app I am still looking for is one that uses the GPS in the phone to lay down a track and then allows you to set way points along the way. I have seen several the come close but not one that does it all, and is well integrated. I want to be able to go on a drive to scout an area then stop and drop way points long the way and later import that into Google Earth so I can then plan resturn visits when the time is right (e.g. sunset/sunrise)
Interesting application.... I could write one like this I think, but for iPhone.
I know exactly what you want.....
My sunset and sunrise calculation are all GPS based, plus the date. In other words, I don't retrieve that info from some Internet site etc. It's all Astronomy.
If you want we can talk about it off this thread.
