Astrophotography Tips for a Crop Sensor and Kit Lens

it's been about four months since I photographed the night sky and that's the longest it's been in the seven or eight years since I started photographing the night skies I'm super excited for tonight weather looks amazing got these incredible ancient tombs on the Southwest coast of turkey in fetier and I brought with me Fujifilm xe4 it's a compact crop sensor camera and I bought it for my personal life and street photography stuff that I don't really share online but I'm interested to see what I can do as an astro camera I'm also going to use the 18 to 55 kit lens so hopefully in today's video I can help you guys who have Kit lenses and more affordable gear and I can share some tips and tricks for getting the most out of a basic setup just gotta wait for it to get dark [Music] foreign oh wow so I haven't been out photographing the stars in so long I completely forgot how to photograph the Stars so before I came out I read a book called photographing the night sky by this lovely chap Allen Wallace and it really got me up to speed and I learned loads of tips and tricks that I can share with you guys about how to get the most out of a basic setup if you'd like to buy that book there'll be a link in the video description down below and to keep the setup basic I'm using a benro carbon fiber slim tripod for 99 pound you get a carbon fiber tripod and a ball head now obviously it's not the sturdiest tripod in the world but for the price it's pretty damn good and so let's talk about the settings I've got here so with the kit lens I'm shooting at the widest focal length which is 18 millimeters on a full frame camera that would be 27 millimeters then we have the aperture which is how wide the opening inside the lens is we want that opening to be as wide as possible to let as much light in as possible so so that's 18 millimeters on this lens the widest aperture I can use is f 2.8 which is surprisingly good for the kit plans because kit lenses normally open up to about F 3.5 and then after that we've gone for a shutter speed of 15 seconds and I did that by using the 300 rules so because this is a crop sensor camera we can use the 300 rule you basically do 300 divided by 18 which is the focal length that I'm shooting at and it comes out at about 16.6666666 and that's basically a good shutter speed to have where the stars are not trailing in your image so if you expose for too long the stars begin to Trail and they no longer look nice and round and pinpoint so that's why I've set my shutter speed to 15 seconds because it's the closest I could get to 16.666666 as for the focus I'm using manual focus and I basically put a a bright star sort of in the middle of the frame use the zoom the manual focus assist Zoom so that when I turn the manual focus dial it zooms in really far and then you swing the manual focus ring back and forth until that star is as small as you can possibly make it then you know you're focused on the stars and they're all going to look amazing just make sure you're not too close to your foreground subject otherwise it might be a little bit blurry but in this case I think we should be fine and then I'm using an ISO of 3200 which is producing a fairly decent looking image I don't really want it to be any brighter or any darker so you can use the isos like your final control of the brightness of the image so I've got a composition here with a a tomb and we've got Ursa Major the Big Dipper or the Big Bear in the sky so I've also set a two second delay on the shutter button because when I press the shutter button the camera is going to shake a little bit so it's nice to give it two seconds or maybe five seconds just to settle down and stop shaking before the exposure starts so good tip there to make sure that you don't have any shakiness in your images I've also turned off high ISO noise reduction and long exposure noise reduction I'll talk more about that later and maybe we could do some tests as well but I'm just going to get this shot and see what we can get in a single exposure with this little compact crop sensor camera so the image on the left is straight out of camera I was pleasantly surprised for a crop sensor camera and a kit lens the image on the right is a quick edit that I did but before I show you how I did that edit let's look at how we can improve the quality of this image before we even edit it so that's what we got with a single Exposure One thing I can do is to get better image quality to get less noise in the image is something called image stacking for noise reduction so I'm basically going to take multiple images the exact same scene same settings I'm going to use the intervalometer built into the Fujifilm camera to take multiple exposures one after the other and I'm going to take those into some post-production software and do something called stacking which is really going to help me get rid of the noise so here are the images I captured 16 images basically exactly the same except the stars move a little bit so to stack these images we have to use specialist software so if you're a Windows computer you want to use sequitol which is free and if you're on a Mac you want to use Starry landscape stacker which is I think it's about 39 and I won't show you guys how to use those in this video because I've already got two videos on my channel one a tutorial on how to use sequitur and another one on how to use Starry landscape stacker but let's just take a look at the improvements if I zoom in here look how clean the sky is compared to this image on the right and the detail in the Rock tomb here it's just way better way cleaner I've got all of this fuzzy noise again Horizon nice and clean and yeah just look at the extra detail from these flowers on the left hand side so stacking has really cleaned up the noise and it looks a lot more detailed and sharper and much better quality so this is the Stacked image and I'm just going to do a quick edit using my Lightroom preset so I would normally do the lens correction but that's already taken care of so step two is to choose the tone so I'm just gonna flick through these presets see which one looks the best it really looks nice meteor maybe I'm going to go with iridium and then even though the stacking has got rid of a load of noise we can still add a little bit of noise reduction just going to use the 20 white balance Auto let's see if that fixes anything for us nothing really changed although the image looks pretty good to me it's a little blue tint to the sky which is not too bad now we can move on to the color grading so we're just going to scroll over these and see oh that one's nice Mars Mercury oh Neptune Saturn kind of like in Saturn so I'm going to apply that and listen local AI presets that I've been playing with to hopefully bring an update to the presets pretty soon now next up we're going to come to the masking and I want to darken the sky a little bit but I don't want to affect the rock tomb so I'm going to create a sky mask but not only that I'm going to intersect that mask with a linear gradient and so I could drag a linear gradient over the sky and it doesn't affect the rock tomb it intersects with the sky selection that I had previously and now I could just go to preset and come down to aw darkened sky and you can play with the amount so somewhere around there is looking pretty good I'm going to create a new mask this time it's going to be a brush and the preset I'm going to use is the aw foreground pop I'm just going to try and bring a bit of the detail out of this foreground here starts off saddle but you can keep brushing and that looks a bit better now it's a little bit more detail in the foreground I'm going to create a new mask this time it's going to be a radial gradient and drag it out move it down a little bit maybe and I want to invert this mask and then I'm going to select in the presets the aw vignette that's added a bit of a vignette to the image you can feather that in a little bit maybe increase the amount um not too strong that's looking good but make some final tweaks to the colors in the hsl so let's come to the Hue and make those yellows slightly more orange and it might bring the saturation of the Blues down a little bit more so something like that and maybe the orange as well it's too much I'm Gonna Keep the colors nice and subtle there we go now let's look at some other ways that we can improve our images so I've got a scene here with one of the bigger tombs here and the constellation Orion in the sky problem is 18 mil focal length which is the widest this kit lens can do just doesn't capture the whole scene it's not wide enough so what I'm going to do is I'm going to shoot a panorama so I'm gonna take one image quite low down and then I'm going to pan the camera up take another image Pan the camera up take another image until I've got all of the scene that I want to capture and when you're panning it's a good idea to have about 40 to 50 overlap between each of the images so the top 50 of the first image would be the same as the bottom 50 of the next image after I've panned up so when I'm moving the camera I can see a bright star on the LCD screen and I make sure that I don't move that star more than 50 percent across the frame and that way I know I've got a 50 overlap between the images so I'm just going to capture probably three maybe four images to get the whole scene that I need then I'll show you guys quickly how to do a panorama and a panorama is a really great way to get better image quality out of a basic camera and lens setup and I'll tell you why in the office here I have the images for the Panorama this was the first frame then I moved up 50 second frame move up fifty percent and move on fifty percent again and in Lightroom you can just select those four right Mouse click come to photo merge panorama try out the different projections to see which one works best so I'm going to go with perspective but I'm gonna drag out the boundary warp a little bit and somewhere around there looks good and we could use the auto crop and yeah that looks pretty good so I'll merge that and then edit it like I did the previous image and this was the final result I'm quite happy with it you can see the Milky Way a real faint region of the Milky Way as well Constitution Orion you've Pleiades the open star cluster and the zodiacal light and this really good detail in the foreground as well this is really surprising for a kit lens and the good thing about panoramas is I now have a really high resolution image you can see it's 7500 pixels by 10 950 pixels so we've produced a really high resolution image the noise the greedy noise is a lot smaller in the image now compared to just a single exposure so it appears to be more clean way more clean than the single exposure would however when you do zoom in you can still see there is quite a bit noisy so what can we do about this so now we've learned two ways to really improve the image quality of a basic camera and lens setup this stacking to get rid of the noise and then there's panoramas which can produce images that appear to have less noise they're much higher in resolution and they just look amazing so what we can do now is combine those two techniques so I'm going to do the same Panorama that I just did however for each of the panels I'm going to capture 16 images stack them and then create the Panorama so here I have 16 images for each panel of the Panorama and I like to stack these in Lightroom you can select all of the similar images come to stacking and normally you'd have an option at this stack but I've already stacked them so you can see that I can close down those 16 if I want to but basically I'm going to take those 16 I'm going to stack them I'm going to take the next 16 stack those then you end up with three images which I eventually stitched into a panorama this was the final result and I'm super happy with it the foreground very detailed it's so clean there's just no noise the sky as well nice and clean the colors look amazing we've got a faint section of the Milky Way Orion ladies Pleiades and much to squeezing all the stars of The Winter Circle asterism as well and you just wouldn't believe that this image was captured with a crop sensor and a kit lens its quality is on par with half of the images I've taken with by full frame camera and expensive lenses and I'm super happy with this result I'll be very happy to share this on my website and Instagram and I'm sure nobody would realize it was captured with such a basic setup okay so this is what you can do with a basic camera and a kit lens to really improve your image quality but let's say you wanted to upgrade is it better to upgrade the lens or maybe buy a star tracker or maybe invest in some education well that's what we'll be looking into in the next video so make sure you hit subscribe hit the little bell icon so that you get notified of when part two of this video comes out and yeah if you go out to enjoy the night sky anytime soon I wish you good luck in place guys

Channel: Alyn Wallace

Views: 21,050

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Id: O2CGnFp4V7s

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023