I'm out here tonight photographing the Milky Way,
which is kind of surprising, actually, because I used to think that every Milky Way photo that
I saw was fake. I thought that the photographer had to take one photo of the landscape during the
day, and then another photo at night - probably using really expensive equipment - and then
stitch the two of them together in Photoshop. I couldn't figure out any other way to take
a good Milky Way photo. And even though, thankfully, I was completely wrong, maybe that's
why this has been the most requested topic that I've ever gotten for a video. There's so much
confusion out there about Milky Way photography and how to get sharp photos of the night sky. So,
I created this course to eliminate that confusion When you're doing Milky Way photography, there
are two huge challenges more than anything else. The first one, of course, is just getting enough
light. And the second is getting sharp stars. Now, these two goals kind of conflict with each
other. That's what I want you to keep in mind throughout this video. You're going to
have to juggle between capturing enough light and capturing sharp stars. For example, one of
the best ways to get a lot of light is to use a really long exposure - like several minutes long
- but that's going to make your stars look blurry, because the stars are moving across the sky.
Like in this exposure, which definitely is bright enough, but it has way too much motion in
the stars. Now, in this video, rather than saying, "Maybe this, maybe that," I'm going to do my best
to avoid generalizations and just give you the exact camera settings that I recommend every
time you're taking Milky Way photos. So let's jump to the studio, and the first topic that
we're going to talk about is camera settings. To start off, when you're taking Milky
Way photos, you basically have to be in manual mode. The automatic modes won't know
what's going on in the photo. They might even try to fire the flash, which isn't going to work
when your subject is trillions of miles away. So, there's basically two different approaches
that you could take to Milky Way photography. The first is to get everything correct in a
single photo, and then the second is instead to merge together multiple photos so that you can
get better image quality. I am going to cover both techniques in this video, but let's just start
with the single image method. You definitely need to understand this one before you go on to
the more complicated method of image blending. Now, there are three big camera
settings that matter the most, and I'm sure you've heard of them before. We've
got shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. I did cover all of them together in a previous video, so
I'll link to that if you need a refresher, but otherwise I'm going to assume that
you've got some familiarity with them. So, let's start with shutter speed. The goal
here is to expose long enough to capture a lot of light, but not so long that the stars
begin to look blurry. You've got to find the right balance in between. And, the amount of
movement in the stars doesn't just depend on your shutter speed. There's also the focal
length of your lens - so, as you zoom in, you're going to magnify the movement of the
stars - and then there's the direction that you face. That last one isn't something
that photographers always talk about, but it's actually a pretty big factor. You
can see the differences in these two photos, both taken at identical camera settings and
each using a shutter speed of 120 seconds. So, for the first photo, I pointed
my camera at the North Star, which is where the stars are moving the
slowest if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. Then I pointed the camera in the opposite
direction. You can see that there's a lot more blur in the second photo, because
the stars are just moving much faster. And I'm not giving off "flat earther" vibes,
right? When I say that the stars are moving, I assume that you know what
I mean? Okay, excellent. So, with that out of the way, I'd
like to point out that it's kind of an unreasonable goal in photography to
have no blur in the stars whatsoever. If you want to have no blur at all, you
either need a specialized tracking head, or you would need to take photos with about a
four or five second shutter speed to completely eliminate movement. And those shutter speeds
just don't let in very much light. So, actually, it's a better tradeoff to use a shutter
speed like, maybe, 20 seconds, even at the expense of a little bit of star trailing. So,
here's a couple example photos to prove that. This first one is taken at 8 seconds of exposure
with a 14mm lens, and that gives you absolutely no blur at all in the stars. Even if I magnify
this photo to some absurd level, like 400%, there still isn't any motion.
But the problem with this photo is that there's a ton of noise and discolored
pixels! It really just doesn't look that good. The next photo is taken at 20 seconds instead, and
that captures more than twice as much light. You might be able to tell already, but especially when
I zoom in, you can see just how much cleaner this photo looks. Right? You can see here in the back
and forth. But you can probably also tell that there's a little bit of blur in the stars. If you
can't see that at 400%, let me zoom in to 800%. Now, I will say that this right here is so
magnified that if you're watching this video on a desktop, it's like looking at an 18 foot print,
or 5.5 meters wide. So, it's very extreme. But, at this magnification, you can tell that the stars
are about three times as long as they are tall. So, that amount of blur is actually going to be my
target. I want the dimmest stars in the photo to be about three times as long as they are tall. And
that means that when I'm taking Milky Way photos, I'm very frequently zooming in on the picture to
make sure that the stars look about like this. Usually, that's going to happen at a shutter
speed in the range of 15 to 25 seconds with a wide angle lens. So, those are some pretty
good default shutter speeds that you can use. Now, you may have heard of some
so-called "rules" for finding the perfect astrophotography shutter speed.
The most famous one is the 500 Rule, which is pretty easy to remember - you can
see it right there - but the 500 Rule also has some serious issues. One of the biggest
is that it doesn't even take into account the direction that you're facing. And
that's why I can't really recommend it. However, there is a more accurate rule out
there called the NPF Rule. It's definitely more complicated as well. But, thankfully,
this calculation is built into a lot of astrophotography apps already. Now, the NPF rule
is designed to tell you a shutter speed that has zero motion blur in the stars at all. So, usually
it's going to spit out a value like 5 seconds or 8 seconds. And I think that I just showed you how
that's a pretty bad tradeoff for image quality. So, what you'll want to do instead is
actually double or even triple the value that the NPF Rule recommends. Personally, I like
the tradeoff the most when you triple that value, just because I like capturing a bit more light. So, I said that I would give you my exact
recommendations, and that's what they are for shutter speed. Use whatever shutter speed
makes the dimmest stars in your photo three times as long as they are tall. It's pretty easy
to find that value just with some trial and error, but you can also find the same shutter speed by
tripling the NPF Rule. It's completely up to you which one of those methods you prefer. At the end
of the day, they should give you the same results. So, next up is aperture. Aperture looks something
like this when you're opening and closing it on your lens. And the wider that the aperture is,
the more light that you're going to capture. But, unfortunately, lenses usually aren't
as sharp at their largest aperture. So, it goes back a little bit to that tradeoff:
capturing light versus capturing sharp stars. Let me show you an example of what
this looks like for aperture. What I did here was take one photo at each
aperture setting from f/1.8 to f/4, going in thirds of a stop. Obviously, the
photos get darker as they go along, so let's just equalize the exposures. And then I'm also
going to correct the vignetting on all the photos. Now let's pull up the two most extreme images
in the set. This first one is taken at my widest aperture of f/1.8, and the second one is taken
at f/4. If I zoom in to the mountain at 400%, you can see that the photo
taken at f/4 is very noisy. The other photo captured a lot more light, and
that means that it's much cleaner by comparison. But when you look at the corners of the photo,
it's pretty clear that the picture at f/4 has smaller and sharper stars. And that's just because
my lens performs better at f/4. So, between the two photos, which one is actually going to be
better? Well, to me, there's still no contest. The noise in the photo at f/4 is so extreme that
it basically ruins the picture. So, the shot at f/1.8 isn't as sharp in the corners, but that's
a tradeoff that I'm absolutely willing to take. And now let me cycle through the rest of the
photos in the corner. You can see that the stars get progressively sharper as I go along, but
the amount of noise is also steadily increasing. To me, the best balance here could be
anything in the range from f/1.8 to f/2.8, just depending on your priorities. Personally,
I tend to settle on about f/2 with this lens, but every lens out there is going to
be different. When in doubt, I would say to use the widest aperture on your lens, just
because it's so critical to capture enough light. Now, there's also the issue of depth of field
that you might have to worry about. And that's because these apertures that I'm talking
about don't give you very much depth of field, even with a wide angle lens. So, if you can,
you should definitely avoid having anything too close to the camera in the foreground. In
fact, the more that you can back up, the better. And if you do have a really close foreground
that just has to be sharp, your only good option is going to be image blending. Again,
I'm devoting a whole section to image blending later in the video, so just watch out for
that if you do need a lot of depth of field. For now, though, when everything in the
photo is farther away in the distance, my specific recommendation for aperture is to
set the widest aperture on your lens by default. If you've already tested your own lens, and you
know that you would rather stop down a little bit, that's perfectly fine. But don't go too far, or your photo is just going to
be absolutely filled with noise. And now we move on to ISO. Of the three
big camera settings, this is the only one that doesn't actually change how much light you
capture. Instead, it's a little bit more similar to brightening your photo in post-processing. But
ISO is still pretty important. If your ISO is too high, you'll overexpose some details in the stars,
and you'll actually make the stars look larger as well. But then if your ISO is too low, you'll
have to brighten that photo way too much in post processing, which is probably going to lead
to color shifts and reveal a lot more noise. The good news is, there's a range
of ISOs from about 1600 to 6400 where neither of those issues is going
to be a big deal. In fact, you can use any of those ISOs pretty much interchangeably,
without fear of ruining your Milky Way photos. If you don't believe me, here's an example with
two pictures. I took both of them at the same shutter speed and aperture, but one photo at
ISO 1600 and another at ISO 6400. Now, after I brighten the photo at ISO 1600, let's zoom in to
the pixel level. So, looking at the two of these, I'm wondering if you can see any difference
in noise performance or detail in the stars. I'll save you the trouble of straining your eyes; the differences just aren't there, even if
you're watching this video at 4K resolution. So, I could talk for 10 minutes about things like
running tests on your camera, extended ISO values, and the ugly duckling of ISO invariance. But with most cameras out there, you just won't see
big differences whether you use ISO 1600, 6400, or anything in between. If I had
to recommend just one of them, though, I would say to use ISO 6400. It's a little
safer in case your camera has really bad shadow recovery, but more importantly, it just gives you
a brighter-looking preview on the camera screen. And at that point, you're pretty well set!
There are going to be some special cases where you'd want a lower ISO, but that's mainly
if there's some other bright object in the photo that you can't overexpose. That
was the case with these photos, where I had to be a bit more careful about my
ISO, but it's definitely not going to be typical. Now, there are some other camera settings
left, but most of these are pretty easy. The big one is that you should definitely be
shooting RAW rather than JPEG. I know that you know that already, but I've got to say
it, because shooting the Milky Way in JPEG is seriously going to hurt your image quality. And, after that point, a lot of the remaining
settings on your camera - like vignetting, noise reduction, saturation, even white balance
- are pretty much irrelevant. And that's because, when you shoot RAW rather than JPEG, you're not
permanently baking most of these settings into the photo. Even with white balance, you can
pretty easily change that in post-processing, and it won't harm your image quality. So, feel free to leave all of those auxiliary
settings wherever they are already. The only exception is something called long
exposure noise reduction. This is just a simple on/off setting. When it's on, the camera
takes a dark frame after every photo. Except, in photography, dark frames aren't really
dark - because, when you brighten them in post-processing, you're going to see some
noise and especially hot pixels like this. So, if you've got long exposure noise reduction
turned on, your camera is going to look for hot pixels in the dark frame and then subtract
them out from your actual photo. That whole process happens behind the scenes. You never
even see the dark frame. But you *will* see that there aren't as many hot pixels in your
photo, and it does affect RAW files as well. Now, the unfortunate part about
long exposure noise reduction is that it takes twice as long to capture every
photo - because the camera is indeed capturing two photos. So, it's up to you if you're willing
to spend that extra time. Personally, these days, I keep it on most of the time, because it's
still quicker than removing hot pixels manually. As for the rest of the camera settings, you
don't really need to do anything special. Screen brightness, I would say,
probably turn it down low. That way, you're not going to mess up your low light vision
or just overestimate how bright your photos are. And then the last one that I'd like to mention is
the interval timer on your camera. This can be a helpful setting if you want to make a time-lapse,
or just so that you can stay in the car while your camera takes some photos automatically. The
reason that I'm talking about it is that you should turn off long exposure noise reduction
if you're planning on creating a time-lapse. Otherwise, you're going to have a delay between
photos that can make the stars look kind of jumpy. And that does it for the dedicated
camera settings! But there's still one huge factor for image quality - and that
is focusing. So, let's jump back to the field, and I'll show you the best focusing
techniques for Milky Way photography. Focusing at night isn't always easy,
but it's critical to get it right. If your stars are even a hair out of focus,
it's going to be visible when you look closely. So, how do you go about focusing in conditions
like this, where there's practically no light at all? Well, the first step is to flip your lens
to manual focus and keep it there all night. Most cameras out there can't autofocus on the stars,
so manual focus is a necessity. And I do recommend switching it on the lens rather than the camera,
just to prevent any possibility of autofocus. And, at that point, where do you actually focus?
Well, you might think that a good answer is to turn your focusing ring to infinity, if your lens
has a scale of distance. And this can be a good starting point, but it's not precise enough to
guarantee that you'll get sharp stars. Instead, you have to focus on a real-world object. One of
the best ones is the moon; it's a very good target for manual focus. Now, if it's too bright in your
image preview, just lower the ISO temporarily, and you'll be able to see a lot more details.
Then, just magnify the image in live view, and spin your focusing ring carefully
until the moon looks as sharp as possible. But if the moon isn't out, something else
you could do is shine a really bright flashlight onto some distant objects in the
foreground, and then focus on those. Of course, this is going to be a lot closer to you than the
stars are. But if you're using a wide-angle lens, it's still basically infinity focus, and
it's not going to be a problem. The only real hard part is getting the object to be bright
enough that you can focus on it pretty easily. Now, if you're traveling with someone else,
my favorite option instead is to hand them a flashlight and tell them to run away from you.
Not for good, just into the distance a little bit! Ask them to go at least 20 paces away, and
then shine the flashlight either onto themself or onto the ground nearby. This way, the
focusing target is going to be much brighter and easier to lock onto. And if you're standing
at something like a lake - and your friend is being stubborn and doesn't want to walk into
the lake - you can always have them walk the same distance in some other direction, focus on
them, and then recompose back in front of you. Now, the last method is to focus directly on the
stars. So, try to find a particularly bright star, and put it in the center of your frame.
Then, magnify live view as much as you can, and carefully spin your focusing ring
until the star is as small as possible. And if the live view on your camera
is too dark to see the stars, you might try opening up the camera's video
mode and then setting the highest ISO. That kind of forces your camera to boost the display so
that, hopefully, you can see things a bit easier. After you're done, you just recompose and
take the photo, and it'll be completely sharp. Now, what if you want to double check that
you've absolutely pinpointed focus? Well, that's always a good idea, and there's
one very useful trick that I like to use to make sure that everything in
your photo is as sharp as possible. All you need to do is just look at the color of
the stars in the photos that you've just taken. Most lenses out there add a little bit of color
fringing to something that's out of focus. So, if all the stars have either a slight green or
magenta halo, that means that they're not properly focused. You can see that in this photo, which has
a pretty clear magenta fringe around the stars. Now, when the stars are magenta, that means that
you focused a bit too far away. On the other hand, if the stars have a green halo, that
means that you focused a bit too close. It's pretty easy to check this, and it could
save you from getting an out of focus shot. Now, the good news - once you've focused - is
that you can just leave it there for the rest of the night, and all of your remaining photos are
going to be sharp. But I do still recommend double checking every so often. One of the many, many
things that has ruined some of my Milky Way photos before is that I accidentally bumped the focusing
ring without realizing it and then took a ton of blurry photos. Definitely not fun. And, actually,
some photographers go so far as to tape down their focusing ring with electrical tape, so they're not
going to run into that problem. And that might be overkill, but you should still review your photos
and double check focus at least occasionally. Now, next up, I'm going to cover the camera
gear and other equipment that I recommend so that you can get maximum quality in your Milky
Way photos. So let's jump back to the studio. Normally, I would be at the front of the
line to say that camera equipment is given way too much attention. But in Milky Way
photography, things can be a bit different. And that's because, when you're fighting
to capture every last bit of light, it really does help to use camera
equipment that's well suited to the task. Now, if you're hearing that, and you're a little
bit concerned about the gear that you have, don't worry. You can still
take sharp Milky Way photos with basically any camera out there - even
a little point and shoot camera - if you use some of the image blending techniques
that I'm covering later in the video. But to get maximum image quality out of a single
frame, here's the equipment that I recommend. First off, in terms of the camera, the biggest
factor is going to be high ISO performance. And that means that there *is* an advantage to
larger camera sensors when you're photographing the Milky Way. But there's also going to be
some variation between different cameras, even with the same sensor size, so
make sure that if you have a choice, you just go with whichever one has better high
ISO performance. Now, what else makes a good camera for Milky Way photography? Well, for
the most part, it's just details. For example, some cameras have backlit buttons, which can be
pretty helpful. Others make it easier or harder to check the sharpness of your stars, just by how
far you can magnify the photos that you've taken. And then you've got some specialized features on
some cameras, like star tracking or live exposure preview, that I know that Pentax and Olympus
owners are secretly hoping that I mention. And all that stuff is nice, but basically
what makes a good camera during the day is also what makes it good at night. So, if
your camera has very intuitive handling, or a long battery life, or anything else like
that, it's going to stand out even more than usual when you're photographing the Milky
Way. Now, I'm not going to cover specialized astrophotography cameras in this video.
There's a lot of them out there, though. They range from some modified DSLRs to specialty
CCD cameras that attach directly to telescopes and only work for astrophotography. It's
definitely good to know that those things exist, but I'm going to keep this tutorial to the
equipment that most photographers tend to have. And actually, on that note, much
more important than the camera is the lens. There's three main factors that
matter here: maximum aperture, focal length, and image quality. Now, from the standpoint
of gathering enough light, maximum aperture is the most important specification on a lens.
Here's a list of each full aperture stop from f/1 to f/5.6. Each time that you move down
one stop on that chart, you're going to capture half as much light, which definitely
makes a big difference for astrophotography. But focal length is also a pretty important
factor. I mentioned that one a little bit ago when I talked about shutter speed, but basically
when you zoom in with your lens, you're not just magnifying the subject. You're also magnifying
motion in the stars. In order to compensate, any time that you double the focal length,
you have to cut your shutter speed in half. And then the last factor is that some lenses out
there just have better image quality than others. You should be able to find this
in pretty much any lens review, but for astrophotography specifically, you'll
want to pay the most attention to sharpness, vignetting, and coma. Coma is this X-shaped
blur that shows up on bright points of light, especially stars, that are
in the corners of your photo. Now, unless your lens has just terrible reviews, I will admit that none of this is anything
you should worry about too much. But it does still have an impact on your photos,
so it's good to be aware of it at least. So then, what are the actual lenses that I
would recommend? Well, I could list off a ton of different options, but realistically any
wide angle lens with a large maximum aperture is pretty likely to be a good choice.
The most popular type is probably a 14mm f/2.8, which is an excellent choice. It's
actually my top recommendation if you don't already have a lens for Milky Way photography.
And the good news is, you can find a lot of these lenses at pretty good prices, depending on
what brand you pick. Still, it's definitely not the only choice. I personally use one of these
- which is a 20mm f/1.8 - at least for most of my Milky Way photos. But you can basically use
anything, so long as it captures enough light. In fact, I've even seen some
photographers use a 50mm f/1.4 - maybe because they wanted the
Milky Way to be larger in their photo, or that's just the lens that they happened to have
with them. And even though you would need to use a pretty short exposure - maybe 5 or 6 seconds
- with one of those lenses, f/1.4 captures a ton of light, and I've definitely seen these
photos turn out really well. So, definitely don't dismiss a lens for Milky Way photography just
because it sounds a little bit unconventional. And that does it for lenses, but another
critical piece of equipment is your tripod. It's really important that you have a
stable tripod for Milky Way photography, or your photos just won't turn out sharp.
I actually saw one website recommend, and I quote, "a tripod, or perhaps a
monopod for Milky Way photography." So, this is a monopod. And, as you can probably
tell, the only good way to take a sharp Milky Way photo with a monopod is to tie three of them
together. So, yeah, you do need a stable tripod. Now, if you're shooting in windy
conditions, it definitely might be more difficult to get sharp stars. When
the tripod moves during the exposure, you're going to get these squiggly looking
stars in the photo. And that's why I always recommend lowering the center column
on your tripod for astrophotography, just in case a gust of wind comes by. And if
that still isn't stable enough, you should start lowering the whole tripod, especially
the thinnest leg sections at the bottom. As for other camera equipment, one helpful option
is to get a tracking head that can rotate with the stars. This lets you use shutter speeds of
several minutes long to capture a ton of detail in the Milky Way. Now, it does mean that the
foreground of your photo is going to be blurry, because you can't track both of them at the
same time. But you could just take a separate photo of the foreground, and then stitch the
two of them together. That's becoming a really popular technique these days, and the image
quality that you can get is pretty incredible. Now, back to the more basic side of things,
it's also just really important to take along some extra batteries. Milky Way photography
is really good at draining your battery, especially when it's cold out. So, I recommend
bringing along at least a couple of spares. Now, another piece of camera equipment worth
mentioning is a remote shutter release. If you have one, you can
use extremely long exposures beyond the normal limit of your camera. I used
one for this photo with a 136 second exposure, because I wanted the stars to look like
they were raining down over the mountain. And then there's just a few odds and ends.
For example, I definitely recommend getting a headlamp, especially one like this that has
a red light mode - because that's just going to be better for your vision at night. Of course,
you definitely need to turn it off before you take the photo, or your foreground might
end up being red without you realizing it. And then we've got safety equipment. Milky
Way photography can take you to the middle of nowhere at some very weird times of night, so
you'll definitely want to take some precautions. Even if it's not supposed to be a cold night, I
recommend bringing along gloves or hand warmers. And if you're in an area with bears,
definitely try to stay in your car, or at least bring along some bear spray. If you
can go along with other people, it definitely helps, but if you can't, it's always important
to do some of these things ahead of time. And I think that does it for equipment!
But before I talk about the image blending techniques that I've mentioned a few times so
far, let me first cover how to find the Milky Way and get the optimal shooting conditions.
Because we've overlooked that a bit too long, and it might even be the most important
thing for getting good Milky Way photos. To the naked eye, the Milky Way at night
looks like a hazy cloud going across the sky. It's definitely visible if
you're in a really dark area, but your camera can pick it up
much more easily than your eyes. So then, what makes good conditions for
Milky Way photography? Well, the most important factors are light pollution, clouds,
the time of night, the season, and the moon. Starting with light pollution, it should be obvious, but the farther
that you are from any cities or towns, the less light pollution that you're going
to get. Light pollution is this yellow glow along the horizon, and if there's any clouds
nearby, they're going to turn yellow as well. So, one website that I like to use to measure
light pollution is called Dark Site Finder. I'll put a link to that in the description. It's
basically a map of light pollution. Here's how it looks for the United States. And you can see just
how much darker the sky is in the western half of the country. But even if you live in the eastern
half, it's actually better than you might think. Anything that's blue or darker on this map
is really solid for Milky Way photography, and you can see little pockets of blue all
over. So, just to put this in actual photos, here's a comparison between a light blue area
on the map compared to a dark grey area. Both of these photos show the same part of the Milky
Way, and I haven't edited either of them yet. Obviously, the photo from the
darker area looks better by default, but you can get something good out of
either of them after post-processing. Now, just because you find a good dark sky
location, that doesn't mean conditions are going to be perfect for Milky Way photography. There
obviously might be some clouds, but beyond that, I've taken some Milky Way photos on what
I thought was a completely clear night, but it turned out that there
was just really high humidity, and that prevented me from getting a good view
of the Milky Way. So, it's really important, no matter what, you have a clear night
when you're taking Milky Way photos. On top of that, the time of year also plays
a surprisingly big role. Specifically, the core of the Milky Way is going to be
the highest in the sky during the months of June and July. And that's actually true
regardless of which hemisphere you're in, which is a little bit mind-bending to try to
visualize. But if you're wondering, the core of the Milky Way is actually a little bit higher
in the sky in the Southern Hemisphere year-round. Now, along with the time of year, there's also
just the time of night. If you want the best view of as many stars as possible, you'll
need to be out a decent bit after sunset. And then - maybe the biggest variable in Milky
Way photography - is whether the moon is out, and what stage it's in. A full moon right next
to the Milky Way is going to be super bright, and it'll probably wash out a lot of the
details in your stars. But, at the same time, the moon can do a great job lighting up the
landscape, so your photo has more than just a bunch of silhouettes in it. You can see how much
darker this landscape gets as the moon is setting, especially when it goes behind the horizon.
And this was actually about a half moon. Now, that actually brings me to a really important
point about composition. A lot of subjects at night are so dark that they basically turn into
silhouettes. If you want to avoid that, there are a few things that you could do. First off, you
could just shoot closer to sunrise or sunset, when everything is going to be a little bit
brighter. Or, you could try light painting on the foreground with your flashlight. And then finally
you could wait, again, for the moon to come out. But I would also recommend trying to embrace the
darkness a little bit. You can look around for subjects like trees, rock formations, or man-made
objects, that would look really interesting even as a silhouette. And you can also try to find
very reflective subjects like lakes or snow that are going to capture some of the
starlight and turn out really interesting. Now, regardless of the conditions, it's
still probably going to be dark enough that composing your photos is a bit of a
challenge. It might take a lot of test photos where you adjust your composition just a
little bit each time to find exactly the framing that you want. But when every photo
takes 20 seconds to capture - or 40 seconds if you've got long exposure noise reduction
turned on - that can be really frustrating. So, the trick that I use to save some time
is to set my camera to the maximum ISO value, and then pick a much faster shutter speed, like
1 or 2 seconds. So, the purpose of these photos isn't to have good image quality - thankfully,
because they definitely won't! Instead, it's just to take really quick test photos to figure out
your composition without waiting around forever. And some cameras out there already have
a mode that boosts live view a ton, and that means that you wouldn't need to use
this trick. But for most cameras out there, taking some sample photos at extremely high ISOs
can save you a bunch of time with composition. Now, when it comes to finding the Milky
Way and planning your shots ahead of time, there's actually some really great apps these
days that you can use to find out when and where the Milky Way is going to be. All you have to
do is hold your phone out and point it at the landscape in front of you, and then see the Milky
Way superimposed in an augmented reality view. I think this is pretty awesome.
It feels very futuristic. And there's a number of apps out there that can
do this. I'm not affiliated with any of them, but my personal preference is for an app
called Photopills. I'll put a link to that one in the description, along with
some other astrophotography resources. And that's the story on planning Milky Way
photos and finding the best conditions. Next up, I'm going to cover the topic of image blending,
which I know that I've hinted at a few times! Image blending, I would say, is a solution
that's almost too good to be true to fix the most common problems in Milky Way photography.
So, if you're getting too much noise or not enough depth of field in your photos, this
should really be able to help you out. Let me start by asking, what is image
blending in the first place? Well, for astrophotography, it can actually
refer to a number of different things. For example, it could be a reference to taking
one photo of the landscape when it's bright out, one photo of the Milky Way at night, and then
stitching the two of them together in Photoshop. That's what I did right here to extend my
depth of field. I shot one photo at f/11, when there was still a little bit of light in the
sky. And then I kept my tripod in the same spot, took a Milky Way photo later in the evening,
and then blended them together. Now, the big tip that I recommend if you're going to do this,
is to shoot both photos at the same ISO value, and then color correct them before you blend
them so the blend works as well as possible. Now, the second method is pretty similar to
that, but it takes things one step further by capturing the Milky Way with a star
tracker. And that's going to give you incredibly high levels of detail. So, to see how
it looks, here's a photo that I took with a star tracker following the Milky Way for about
14 minutes of exposure. And when I zoom in, the image quality here is absolutely amazing.
Compare that to a standard photo of the Milky Way, and you can probably see why star trackers
are so popular. But, like I mentioned earlier, the foreground here is actually blurry,
because you can't track both the stars and the foreground simultaneously. So, I had
to take a separate photo of the foreground, and then stitch them together in Photoshop.
But I really like how the result turned out. The third method is just traditional focus
stacking, but at night. If you haven't heard of focus stacking before, that's when you take a
series of photos in a row that are focused farther and farther away, and then you can merge them
together so that everything is sharp from front to back. This method can't really get rid of noise,
but it can extend your depth of field quite a bit. I actually did that on this same landscape again,
and I think that it worked pretty well. But I tend to avoid this method most of the time, especially
if there's anything moving in the foreground, because even a little bit of error between two
photos can end up looking really weird in the final blend. You can see that a bit in this
photo - whatever that thing is. And I could always clone this stuff out in Photoshop, but it's
still better if it's not there in the first place. And then the final method is actually my
personal favorite. What you do here is take a series of Milky Way photos, and then
average them together to reduce noise. Now, you do have to do this with specialized software
that aligns the stars before averaging them. And that does add a bit of complexity, but
I really like how flexible this method is, and it can give you amazing image quality
as well. And, of course - just like all the other methods - image averaging can also
extend your depth of field. This photo - same landscape again - is actually a combination of 33
individual frames, each taken at f/8, 25 seconds, and then ISO 51200 so the photos would be bright
enough. When I averaged the photos together, it reduced a ton of noise, and I really like
how the final shot looks. Now, the software that I used is called Starry Landscape Stacker,
and the other popular one out there is called Sequator. I'll put a link to both of those below.
Again, I'm not affiliated with either of them. And basically what you do is you tell the software
what part of the photo is sky, and what part of the photo is ground. Then the software is going
to average your photos together without blurring the stars, and it'll give you really good
image quality. Now, just a quick note, to actually maximize your image quality, you should
be using *more* exposures and *quicker* exposures. For example, maybe 100 photos, each with a 5
second shutter speed. I didn't do that here; I probably should have. All it means is that I could
have gotten less star trailing in my final result. Anyway, hopefully you can now see just how
flexible these image blending techniques really are. It's not about getting rid
of just a little bit of noise; it's really about extending
the capability of your camera to get better photos - or even photos that
would be impossible to take any other way. But there's still no such thing as a perfect
technique, and image blending isn't the exception. On one hand, you might just have some ethical
questions about it, especially if you're stitching the Milky Way into an unrelated landscape photo
that you took on a completely different day. But aside from that, you can never know for sure
how well the images are going to blend together until you actually get them back to your computer.
The software could always mess up. Maybe something was moving through one of the frames. Who knows?
There's just a little bit more that could go wrong any time that you're blending photos together.
So, that's why I always recommend taking some standard, single images along the way, even if
it's just for backup. And, also, if you're taking really critical photos, you might consider using
more than one of these techniques. For example, maybe take a set of photos for image averaging,
but then separately take a focus stack just for backup. You can never be too careful, especially
if it's a shot that you feel really excited about. Now, before I wrap up this video, I'd like to
emphasize that astrophotography is a huge genre, and there's a ton of other topics like
star trails, deep sky astrophotography, and a bunch of others that you can go
into with a lot of interesting results. And this tutorial that you're watching right now
is actually part of a multi-video course. So, I'm going to cover some of those topics later
for those of you who want to go into more detail. But the big elephant still in the room is
post-processing. And that's actually going to be the next chapter in this course, because it
needs a video of its own if I'm going to cover everything properly. But now you know all
the field stuff. You know exactly how to take the best possible Milky Way photos
and optimize all of your camera settings. So, to end this video, people always ask me - I've
done so much Milky Way photography, have I ever seen a UFO? And I'm not sure if YouTube is going
to let me say this next part, but I actually - [STATIC] Hey guys! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.
As I mentioned, this is a multi-video course, and the next one is going to cover
post-processing the shots that you just captured. I'll have that up in about a week,
and when, I do, it'll pop up right there. So, click that to go to the next video. And if
you do want to see more tutorials like this, you can always consider subscribing to my channel
and hitting the little bell notification button on YouTube. Thanks for watching! My name
is Spencer Cox. And I'll see you next time.
