In this interesting tutorial, David Childers from lightroomzen looks at how he captured and edited a magnificent image of the milky way.
There are 3 main things that you should consider even before you go out to take your first picture of the night sky:
- Location – you would like to have a place with as little light pullotion as possible (remote locations – the desert etc. are typically the best). You can use darksitefinder to find a spot.
- Locate the milky way in the sky – you can do this with an app called star chart (iOS / Android).
- Use a fast wide angle lens (you can use a longer lens but wide lens will give you a more open frame).
A full frame camera with a good sensitivity is optimal as there is a good chance that you will need to shoot at high ISO (6400 ISO or above – in this case Childers shot at ISO 8000 – he used D750). The exposure is going to be long – around 15 seconds in this case – but it really depends on the situation. Of course shooting a Panorama is ideal – he shot 15 different images. The rest of this video deals with the post processing of all the RAW data and how Childers makes the most out of the original images that he took.
We recently published another extensive look at shooting and processing stars images by our colleague Patrick Hall from Fstoppers which you can watch – here. Of course astrophotography is nothing new of course and we have covered the topic in the past including How To Photograph The Milky Way (or Die Trying, PBS: The Beauty of Space Photography and Beginners Guide to Star Trails Photography amongst others.
You can check out many more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section here on LensVid.