Perseids Meteor Shower Photography Class with Ian Norman

and we are live hello photopillars rafael de barra here and welcome to another master class today we're going to learn how to photograph the birthdays with ian norman ian how are you man hey everyone hey raphael it's good to see you welcome welcome welcome so glad you're here with us today and we're really looking forward learning birthday so mitchell photography with you man yeah yeah i'm excited um you know uh i haven't been out shooting in a little while especially from the pandemic and so i'm excited that the opportunity of uh being able to go out and you know and shoot the perseids next week so yeah it's gonna be awesome it's gonna be awesome for the people that doesn't know who your norman is and who are you and she was talking about about a bit about you and what do you do uh so uh my wife diana and i started a website called lonelyspec.com and lonelyspec.com is all about night photography just uh everything night photography and we write tutorials and basically try to create resources and tools for especially for beginners to learn astrophotography we especially love landscape astrophotography and you know capturing scenes of the earth with the night sky um shooting the milky way and shooting the stars um so loneliest spec.com we started in uh 2013 and ever since then we've sort of been building a community there just centered around astrophotography all of our tutorials are free and you know we're just trying to make the best resource that we can online for anybody wanting to learn how to shoot photographs of the stars yeah definitely man i mean the long respect when we started you know photo appeals believe it or not you were a great inspiration for us because we learned so much thank you photography from your blog and this uh definitely guys if i suppose that everybody's like that has that is watching us know lonely spending and you normal but if you don't know it go and go and check longspan.com it's an amazing resource for astrophotography and photography in general thanks rafa yeah so i figured that maybe we'd start off a little bit um and just show a few of the photos that uh i've made recently some of the projects that i've been working on this particular shot was actually shot in the basically the home of photo pills in menorca spain diana and i went to the photopills camp uh last year in 2019 and uh where uh one of the nice i um pointed this my camera to one of my favorite parts of the night sky called uh the row of yuki cloud complex it's one of the most colorful parts of the night sky um and uh so that you know this is this is kind of more uh in tune with what we think of astrophotography being in the traditional sense sort of just photos of stars and nebula and stuff like that and i i think that this astrophotography while it can be really beautiful is is maybe it lacks a certain connection i think with the earth so that's where i wanted to sort of move on and show some of the work that's a little bit more in tune with what most of lonely speck is about and that is photographing the milky way with the earth in the foreground this is also shot kind of near menorca on the mainland in andorra which is a small country just north of spain and uh you know it's the milky way rising up over the uh uh wait what is the pyrenees there is that correct yeah um and uh you know so this is a lot more like what the type of content we love talking about on lonely spec and most of the photographs that i've personally been working on lately um are made with a special technique called panorama stitching where i'm using a fairly long lens so i'll shoot on like a hundred millimeter lens um which is you know normally used for like portraits or um you know studio or sports work and i'll shoot a mosaic of multiple images to to come up with a really really high resolution photograph so this photograph that you guys are looking at is actually almost 500 megapixels in size so it's very very high resolution and so i've been working on this technique just for the last a couple of years now making uh photographs are anywhere between 500 megapixels up to almost one gigapixel in size i really really enjoy doing this method a lot it's it's a little bit time-consuming um but i think it's sort of like worth the trade-off in the effort definitely a more advanced technique not something i'd recommend for a beginner but if you sort of dip your feet into astrophotography and you really want to get started on on drastically improving like the resolution and the quality of your photographs then i think it's a really fun technique to try and i have a tutorial on lonely spec that outlines everything that i do to create these really really high resolution astrophotos um if you want we can leave a link in the description on this video to the to that tutorial that would be great uh yeah sure i can uh is that something that we can do uh like after the stream or live yes okay yeah great no problem um yeah so uh yeah these are these are just the types of photographs that uh we love to take um uh diana and i also uh we've recently started a project building a camper van we're actually pretty much finished with it there's a few finishing touches on it um and that's basically what we would have been doing had there not been a pandemic we'd be touring around the united states in our camper van shooting the stars we're really hoping to be able to do a little bit of that before the end of the summer this year um depending on how we can manage our travel but you know this is sort of what we live for going out being under the stars and uh capturing it you know for for others to see it sounds like a great plan man i mean yeah so we're right now located um we're located in chicago that's kind of like our home base in the united states and uh believe it or not you can actually photograph uh you know the milky way and the stars um only just a few hours away from a big city this is actually only um about two hours from uh downtown chicago um in a little wildlife preserve and this is actually the location that we're gonna be showing you on our plan for uh shooting the perseids so um diana and i are going to go out there next week to hopefully capture the meteor shower and this is the location that we're going to be shooting from this particular shot was made in january of this year showing the orion uh all the nebula around the orion constellation and um you know some of the sort of like winter night sky um and this also is a very high resolution panorama um something like 500 megapixels so where is our eye in there um yeah orion is is is right here this sort of pink spot that you see um this is a very very wide field of view it's um it's about the equivalent field of view of like using a 12 millimeter lens on a full frame camera um and you can see if you look right kind of in this area there's three stars there that are the staple orion's belt and then below it is the bright orion nebula and orion has uh all kinds of cool like gases and stuff around it um there's this big kind of reddish loop that the c-shaped loop called barnard's loop um and then there's this little uh this like red spot called the angelfish nebula and there's a whole bunch of other stuff in there as well there's a tutorial on lonely speck for uh specifically about photographing the orion uh like cloud complex like capturing all of the different nebula around the orion uh constellation nice nice beautiful so of course we're here to talk about something else and that is meteors uh meteor showers we have the perseid meteor shower that's coming up um august 12th 13th depending on where you are here it's peaking i think on the 12th that basically at the night of august 11th uh transitioning into like you know midnight of the of august 12th is is when uh when we plan to go out and shoot um and uh so i i wanted to talk about uh this particular um set of photographs that i made from a past year meteor shower these are actually the geminid meteors but a lot of the conditions that i encountered during uh this meteor shower that i'm showing you um are going to be fairly similar um to what we'll have on uh on august uh 12th of this year so uh you know i think this will be like a pretty good demonstration of uh of what we can uh what we can expect yeah so uh these photographs were made in california um from a place called red rock canyon state park and it's uh just a couple hours north of los angeles um it's a little bit light polluted it's definitely not like the best dark sky location but it's adequate for you know especially for doing something like a meteor shower the geminids uh geminid meteor shower is usually in december and then the perseid meteor shower is in august and um but the they tend to be each of those tends to be like basically the two kind of like best meteor showers of the year um i think uh at least for for the northern atmosphere yeah you know the most powerful i think yeah right the quadrant is also great but yeah so um one of the things what's that that light that you have on the wall i mean i feel like there's a dark yeah that's a good question so i showed you this uh the first photograph was very dark and that was before the moon rose so you know we were getting super dark dark conditions um and then the moon started rising and it was uh it was about um a half illuminated moon about 50 you know like uh uh eliminated moon and it rose around midnight and then started lighting up the tops of those cliffs so that's what that light is from is actually from the moon lighting up the cliffs and the cool thing about showing you these two photographs is that's almost exactly the conditions that we're going to have next week during the perseids the beginning of the night uh from sunset until about midnight ish depending on where you are uh will be dark there will be no moon in the sky and then uh right around the middle of the night the moon will start to rise uh and we'll start you know it'll it'll turn the sky blue slightly in your photographs it'll start illuminating the landscape and so um you know i think the photographs that i made and that will demonstrate uh the processing of uh will be a pretty good example of what you guys can expect if you actually go out shooting next week and and trying to capture the perseid meteor shower that's going to be great because today we're going to see the whole process from the idea the planning the gear how to take the photo and also a bit of you know the post processing which is so important with the meteor shower photography it's gonna be great yeah excited so do we want to go ahead and and kind of take a look at the plan that i have for the perseids sure sure okay so i'm gonna pull up um on the computer here see if i can find a plan and okay here we go so uh right now you guys are looking at my phone screen and i have the photopills app open um and uh so i've put together a plan in photo pills using the the planner function so i'll open that right now and just to sort of give you some context of what we're looking at i'm going to zoom out and i'll turn off the milky way visibility here so if i zoom all the way out i've got the red pin positioned just west of chicago this is about two hours away from chicago there's a small wildlife preserve and that's the photograph that i showed earlier in the stream of the sort of like country road and the orion constellation it was shot at that red pin location so that's the location that i want to go shoot so zooming in there you can sort of see this green area it's called the green river wildlife management area and it's one of the few places that you can go you know at night and it's fairly dark because it's away from the city and this this is something to sort of keep in mind for if you do plan to go out for the perseids is find a public space that's open at night also one that is open you know i mean the pandemic has certain public lands and stuff like that so definitely check the website of the location or maybe give the office a call and see if they have any uh you know closures or you know see what you can do make sure you can go there at night and i know that this place is open as far as i know and there's a lot of you know farmland and stuff around the area um so it you know it's it's relatively dark definitely not the darkest uh location in in uh in the world that's for sure so uh there's a few things that i wanted to talk about um on photo pills um you know i think rafa will definitely want me to mention here about some of the tools that they've integrated for planning meteor showers specifically and i have those enabled right now if we look at this top bar i can sort of swipe uh left and right on it and enable and disable certain things and if you kind of swipe all the way over to the right here there's a meteor shower tool and right now i have the perseids enabled and you can actually tap to enable and disable it when you add a meteor shower to the planner you have the option to select any of the meteor showers for any year which is really great and so obviously we're talking about the current one which is the perseids so once i tap that then it adds a few different things to the planner to help you figure out when the best time is to uh to go out and shoot it also automatically advances the date to the uh to the peak i believe yes when you select it yeah um so it advanced it to um midnight of uh like midnight uh and and 10 minutes of um the 12th of august and that that is the night that uh we plan on going out so it's it's it's the night of the 11th uh to the the 12th um and uh so there's a couple things that it adds to the uh to the planner uh one of them is in the actual planner view there's uh if you look in here there's this little black circle here and it has like a little symbol of the meteors on it and that is showing us the the position like sort of like the compass position of where the meteors will be uh radiating from so it's it's the point uh at which all the meteors will appear to travel from in the sky that's not necessarily the um where they'll be in the sky but it's the point at which it'll appear that they're traveling from if that makes any sense yeah so uh and and the cool thing about it is if we if we scroll on the timeline and select a different time of night we can see that that position the the radiant point changes its position through the night and that just has to do with the rotation of the earth so as the earth rotates that radiant point is sort of moving around the sky and uh you know it'll change its relative position uh to where we're pointing our camera so that's the first thing that it adds so it at least gives us a direction of where we should face so i know that if if i'm shooting during like the really peak part of the night right near midnight that the radiant point of the meteors is actually going to be just a little bit above the horizon and it looks like sort of to the the north east and as long as i'm pointing my camera in that direction i should be able to to get the radiant point of the meteors so that that's a really really nice feature that they've added into photopills uh you know super cool to see um yeah definitely because you know uh some people wants to create these composite images afterwards you know with all the meteos pointing in to the radiant in the sky you want to create this kind of this kind of images you need to really you know put the radiant in the frame when you're shooting so that's a great tool to have it uh really easy to to understand on the map it's uh it's great right so the next thing um uh that i think is really cool and it's uh it's kind of down on the bottom here um let me see if i i don't know if i can i guess i can't really trying to see if i could zoom in on the stream uh but if you look do you mean the great the gray area right yeah for the gray area yeah so um if we look down at the very bottom on this timeline that i'm moving back and forth you can see that there is just sort of like a little uh gray section of the graph and that's highlighting the visibility of the meteors and how much visibility you can expect to have and you can see that it starts low in the in the beginning part of the night and it gradually increases to a peak and then it starts to lower again and then increases to a second peak and that has to do with a couple different things well for one the meteors are going are becoming um more and more active throughout the night so you know as as the night goes on uh we'll be able to see them more and more and also the the skies are getting darker and darker so that helps with the visibility of those meteors but the other thing that happens right around midnight this little drop that drop is in there because the moon is rising so the photopills team actually figured out that the visibility of the meteors it's affected by the moonlight and they added that to that graph so you can sort of expect like a sort of dip in the visibility of the meteors um midway through the night um so you know this sort of gives us an idea like okay if we want uh to be able to shoot then we need to be able to uh to shoot during the um the beginning part of the night uh through till around midnight in order to get the absolute best uh you know frequency of meteors with the darkest skies and then we should expect it to sort of dip off a little bit later in the night just because the moon is rising so that's a really cool thing to look at and the interesting thing about it too is we can actually scroll over to the next day or the next evening and we can see that has a very similar get uh graph so there is a sort of like another shooting section that we have as indicated by this sort of gray section of this graph so i think that's a really really cool feature just to sort of help plan the best nights and if we go like several days farther we can see that that gray graph gets gets really really small because we're now leaving the peak time of the calendar for the perseid meteor shower um so that'll definitely help you plan the best night that um you know for for shooting the meteors do you suggest uh to shoot uh throughout the whole night or just uh yeah i would i would suggest um shooting the whole night if you can afford to stay up that late um yeah um so meteor showers are kind of fickle um you know the best we have is is statistics to try and like understand when the best time might be but it you know i mean they're uh they're a natural phenomena so they you know they vary in in their intensity you know even though it might be like right on the peak of what is predicted um you know it it could be a little bit better later it could be a little bit better earlier um so you know it's one of those things where in order to really successfully capture a meteor shower it's best to shoot as much of the night as you possibly can to get the best chances of capturing them to give you an example of that if we if we go back actually to that photograph that i i showed before i need to exit full screen here so if we look at this photograph that i showed you guys before uh there's about 20 meteors in there there's some fairly dim ones that might not be as visible but i captured about 20 meteors that night in a single composition but it didn't take a single exposure to capture all 20 of those meteors i actually had to shoot about 200 exposures over a very long period of the night in order to capture that many meteors so this is actually a sort of compilation it's a composite of all of the best frames that i found for that night and uh you know each one uh you know i selected each one with a meteor um so when you see a photograph of a meteor shower and it has multiple meteors in it all radiating from a point or you know like this where they're all you know all in the same frame um that photograph is pretty much always a composite of a long portion of the night you know so it's sort of capturing uh where all those meteors were for that particular night so um so that's something that we need to keep in mind just like we're trying to maximize our ability to capture the meteors so we need to shoot as as long as possible during the night that's cool and how do you find these locations because you know i suppose one of the key parts is scouting and finding cool locations and then of course can tell you you know for that location uh when you should be there to shoot uh but for example this this competition is great and uh the foreground is king right when to microphone with the sky right right um yeah it's actually like any process on scouting or um yeah so i i tend to like to use um well there's a few different things um i mean google maps obviously um as like initial scouting so looking for those uh you know those green areas on the map usually you know like public lands forest lands natural preserves stuff like that that tends to be a good way of doing it in the united states in particular most public lands are open at night and so that that ends up being like the first you know go-to place anywhere with camping that's open you know if the campground is open then you you obviously can be there at night so you know paying the camping fee and and finding a spot you know that can be a really great way to do it um this particular location actually um the red rock canyon state park has a campground at it so it's a really you know easy place to be able to stay over at night um but yeah that's that's honestly like the the very first thing that i do um because you know especially in the united states like um you know we don't have any we don't have like that law that they have in norway which basically says that you can just roam anywhere and and just be there because i i forgot the name of it it's a really cool law that they have in norway where you can like basically traverse across private property if you need in order to access public lands and that doesn't exist in the united states you know you have to be wary of what's private land and what's not um and so yeah the safest bet is to definitely look for uh you know publicly accessible lands on google maps your research online and then i suppose when you find a cool location so about you know getting there a few days earlier and explore and apply to your planning and find your composition exactly yeah and um you know when it when it does come down to finding um you know maybe you're trying to figure out like okay i want to you know look towards the radiant point um you know this is sort of going back to what we were showing on on photo pills you know perhaps there's something that you want to include in your photograph at that particular location and i know that um so if i zoom in here let's see if i can kind of show it i'm going to change the map to satellite here and so kind of looking in on the map here in this location so i have it on the green river uh like visitor center there um but my actual shooting location i want it to be kind of up here on this road and uh so i sort of actually plan on uh let's see if i can put the put the red pin there so i plan on standing on this road um and i want to shoot kind of towards the indicator here um to the north and um you know i know that in the beginning of the night the radiant point of uh of the the meteors is going to be fairly far north so i should be able to capture that in my frame so right when it gets you know when it gets super dark around you know 10 p.m 11 p.m and midnight um as long as i'm sort of pointing toward the north i should be able to get that radiant point in in the the right side of my image and one of the things i like to do you know once i'm there once i'm like at the location um you know maybe the sun is coming down and i'm sort of trying to figure out where i want to stand and i don't really know you know maybe exactly where to look um photopills has you know obviously the the night ar mode and and that's something i can show here um i'm just going to show it from my seat so let's see if i enable this okay you guys can see my my laptop and everything and this is this is just our our living area um assume assume i'm outside and uh i want to figure out where the radiant point of the proceeds are i can just aim like my phone around and it says okay the perseids are going to be over there over by our projector screen um so i know you know when i'm when i'm standing outside that oh i just point my camera you know to include that point in the sky and that's where the perseus will be um so that's that's a you know an excellent tool um uh that that photopills has in there using that night ar mode um so that's that's one of my favorite things about photopills honestly it's like it's like huh where should i point my camera okay knight ar mode oh there's the radiant point or oh there's where the milky way is going to be and all those things are highlighted on night ar one of the coolest tools in photopills for sure that was great i mean i think we have a plan right you know yeah the eleven we're playing yeah and you know where the rainy is that was assuring spot and it's about getting there before sunset i suppose and you know maybe adjust the compo and that's it right yeah yeah so um i figured we'd probably want to go you know okay we've got our plan um you know what are we gonna bring uh like what should we make sure that we have with us to maximize you know our ability to capture those meteors so i figured we'll go ahead and switch over from screen sharing mode here i'm going to stop my screen share and i wanted to talk a little bit about the gear that we like to use and what you guys should think about when you are going out for uh shooting meteors you know what you should bring with you um first and foremost obviously is a camera um so uh diana and i shoot on sony cameras um we shoot on this is the a7 mark iii uh which is like a full frame mirrorless camera you don't need to have the fanciest camera to go out but we would suggest that you use you know an interchangeable lens camera like a canon dslr a nikon um you know uh sony olympus panasonic pentax whatever you know fujifilm uh something where you can any camera is good yeah chrome sensor camera um i would i would suggest you know um usually like a good sweet spot i would suggest probably micro four thirds and larger sensors if you can um you know i mean i i don't think you should just go out and drop you know three thousand dollars on a brand new camera just for the perseids um you know shoot with what you have if you can um and uh you know don't let the gear be the thing that prevents you know feels like oh you know my old canon rebel is so old i shouldn't even bother don't do that like go out with your camera go out with what you have because it'll probably work just fine uh you just need to make sure that it has you know the manual exposure mode so you want to make sure that it has you know the the mode dial so you can select uh manual mode um and uh you know an interchangeable lens on it is super helpful because you want to you want to be able to select a lens that has a very wide field of view if possible since meteors are kind of fickle and you know you never know where they're going to be in the sky the best thing to do equipment wise is to just make sure you have as wide of an angle lens as possible like the shortest focal length widest angle lens that you have this lens is a an 18 millimeter so on full frame that's pretty wide that's uh i think uh like a hundred degrees of field of view um from corner to corner um so it's considered like a super wide angle um and they make you know even wider angle lenses you know 14 millimeters or even 12 millimeter lenses that are just you know really massive uh fields of view um a fish eye lens is actually not a bad idea for shooting meteors because you know like i said we're just trying to capture as much of the sky as possible so yeah i think that's that's uh that's what we shoot on so this is the 18 millimeter zeiss baddest lens and then the sony a7 mark iii um and uh yeah so first step camera wide angle lens um preferably one that has a fairly low f number you know uh f 2.8 or f 1.4 if you have it um the next uh most important thing obviously uh is a tripod so we're gonna be shooting uh we're gonna be shooting long exposures right and uh we want our camera to just sort of be in one spot you know for our you know find our composition in the early part of the night and leave it there and just shoot the whole night that's that's what meteor shower shooting is all about um so uh tripod got the photo pills uh shout out on there the stickers that you got from the photopills cam right yeah yeah uh working together in the us man so uh i i mean tripod wise you know i i honestly like you know it doesn't really matter what you use uh you know we we have carbon fiber tripods i like them they don't get super cold at night uh you know because they're essentially plastic um so if you're carrying them around you know like having an aluminum tripod and bare hands is like really really cold lighter weight too i have a special head on here this is actually uh for my panorama shooting but a regular ball head is perfect um that's what i would recommend just for fast composition having a fiddle with something like this is maybe not the best uh example but yeah so regular tripod and then of course we need to be able to see in the dark so a headlamp uh is essential um because you know if you're walking around at night and you're trying to to handle your camera um you know in your fiddling around with a tripod you can't you can't handle a camera and hold uh you know flashlight or torch like you know and manipulate things when one of your hands is is being used by the flashlight so um headlamp is essential um i just said this is just a really small cheap you know black diamond headlamp um and then the most important thing for uh for a meteor shower is to get one of these and that's an interval timer the reason i say that this is the most important thing is is this is what sort of separates just regular nighttime shooting where we can press the button and being able to essentially record a time lapse so when we're doing meteor showers we want to set up our camera to record a whole bunch of consecutive frames uh one after another over the course of the night like i said in my demo shot which i'll show you later i shot over 200 photographs and i did that using one of these it plugs into your camera and it has a little built-in clock there you can see it's set to 20 seconds right now and that right there is an interval between shots so every 20 seconds it'll press the shutter for me and so i would usually program like in my case i think i i used i don't know we'll look at the exif data of the shot but i use something around 15 seconds and uh so i wouldn't want to set an interval just slightly longer than 15 seconds something like 20 maybe 17 seconds or something um and make sure that do you suggest the delay like you know you have your exposure time and then one two seconds delay between um yeah in general like if um it doesn't matter as much on modern cameras but there's some like weird timing things that cameras do and so i usually suggest two seconds longer than your shutter time and we'll talk about a little bit about the shutter times um uh right after uh right after i talk about uh gear here um but yeah so i would usually set it two seconds longer than your shutter time so if your shutter time is 15 seconds you can set your interval to 17 seconds and that should be pretty good um you know for for being able to shoot uh through the whole night now um something to also consider um another like option and i'll mention this again when i talk about camera settings is you could put your camera on continuous shutter mode you know the mode where if you were to hold down the shutter it would just fire a bunch of photos off if you enable that mode and you have a simpler just trigger oftentimes the triggers will have they'll have a button that you can slide up and what that'll do is that'll act as if you're continuously holding the shutter it's usually labeled hold as you know as if you're holding the shutter and so what that'll do is if you have continuous shutter mode enabled it'll just take photos as often as it possibly can and that's sort of like a simpler way of uh of shooting a time lapse like this uh just as as fast as you possibly can without having to program the interval um it could present some problems if you do rely on that because if your camera's not fast enough to save the files um it'll start sort of backing up and it might have you know longer delays between it but it should still work you know for most modern cameras most most modern cameras are fast enough to keep up especially if your photographs are like 15 seconds long that should be enough time for it to save while it's exposing the next shot so um so i think that's basically it in terms of gear definitely remember in interval timer some cameras have them built in too a lot of modern cameras have a time lapse mode or interval timer function in the menu so you know take a look at your uh your your camera instruction booklet and see if it's in there you know browse through the menus and see if you can find it because a lot of modern cameras already have it built in um so you might not have to go buy an interval timer before the perseid so definitely check that out yeah and what about the filters because uh i mean we're using your uh pure knife filter for you know i guess high pollution here it's super useful are you gonna use it for yeah so um so um on lonelyspec.com uh we we actually manufacture and sell um this thing it's called the pure night um it's a simple square filter and it fits into a filter holder which i can show you here actually have one in here let me pull it out so this is a square filter holder and it's a simple uh frame that fits onto the front of a lens so you screw it onto the front of the lens and it gives you these slots in order to fit a filter in and so the the pure night is uh you know it's a it's a square filter and it just sort of slots in um and this is a light pollution filter so it it filters out a lot of the sort of like orange ugly glow um that you get from cities um so you know any of the orange colored lights that sort of turn the sky kind of like this brown color um it filters that out and usually gives you a little bit better contrast in the night sky um and it can definitely be helpful in sort of like a suburban uh setting where you're you know like in the case of our plan where i'm only going to be two hours away from downtown chicago so there's still a lot of light pollution um and so this is definitely something that i would i would put on there um so you can check those out on lonelyspec.com um definitely we're we're using actually uh uh antonio photography for our team i mean he's super happy with your field filter here minorca we have light pollution from the urban areas and also from our neighbor island majorca and uh the filter it's really it really gives great results is you get a much darker sky and yeah yeah yeah that's why we that's why we made it um you were the first ones to create this filter we were yeah we we had the uh yeah we had the market for several years before uh filter companies started copying us uh so if you want the original and you want 100 guarantee with it then you know you can go fire filter you know being able to create something that doesn't exist and that really helps i mean of course everybody will copy you afterwards but uh yeah that makes you big i mean that makes you great yeah yeah it was fun it was a fun project i'm glad that we we did that um yeah first a little background like uh just for our viewers i am an engineer and so like the opportunity to create like a product um centered around my passion which is photography um you know really really fun and so that you know that's one of the product products that we ended up developing to hopefully make you know people's time shooting night photography better and i'll talk about this other one that we make we have another filter we'll talk about that in a little bit when we talk about focusing so i'm going to share my screen again i've got a couple slides because i want to talk about um you know you know once you have all your gear you're at your spot uh what are the settings that you need to have on your camera in order to really get the best results so uh we're going to go ahead and open that up so i'll share my screen here yes here you are yeah we're seeing your screen yep and i present okay so uh so we just went over the basic equipment here it is on a list essentially so your dslr wide angle lens headlamp tripod and an interval timer uh pretty straightforward now uh the first question that we're gonna get is like you know what what kind of exposure uh would you suggest um the shooting meteors is very similar to doing something like shooting the milky way the settings are pretty much the same at least what i would recommend and uh these settings should work pretty much in any situation where you have reasonably dark skies if you're you know in in a suburban area to you know extremely dark you know rural uh desert or something like that these settings should work pretty much every time since we're shooting on a wide angle lens i recommend the shutter time around 20 seconds 20 to 30 maybe that should be long enough for us to capture plenty of light and it should be short enough that we're not going to blur start blurring the stars um so that's sort of like a sweet spot i think in the example that i gave my photo or my exposure was around 15 seconds or so we'll we'll find out um an aperture should be a low f number if possible um the lowest f number that your your camera has is what i see or your lens has is what i would suggest so in this case of the the lens that i showed you guys earlier it's an f 2.8 lens so i'm going to shoot at f 2.8 just to make sure that i'm capturing as much light as possible the lower that f number the the larger the aperture and the more light that your lens is collecting and then finally the iso this one doesn't matter as much but you know of course we want the image to be bright enough that we can see it um so i usually suggest around iso 3200 to iso 6400 this depends a little bit on your camera some cameras are better at certain iso settings but that range is usually very very safe for night photography it's not going to be so high that you're completely blowing out you know like the bl with the bright uh light polluted areas but it's not so low that you're going to be coming out with an image that's just too dark if you go too low if you end up shooting at an iso like iso 100 it'll actually be so dark that the the um you won't even be able to see anything on your lcd and uh most cameras tend to actually be a little bit noisier if you're if you're all the way down at iso 100 and you're shooting in these very very dark conditions so don't shoot at iso 100 don't be afraid to bump it up to 3200 6400 i mean some cameras are even uh have their best night performance like low light performance at iso 12 800 depending on what you have so definitely something not to be afraid of uh doing is bumping up that iso okay so beyond the basic exposure uh there's a few things that we want to go through our camera menu and check the first and foremost the most important one is to always shoot in raw it's there it adds so much flexibility when it comes to editing to be able to edit a raw photo rather than a jpeg there's just more data saved in a raw file and when you have better data it gives you things like better color and better control of the color and it's sort of like it's like keeping the negatives of your old film camera um you know if you throw away the negatives and you're just stuck with the prints um you know you're never going to be able to to reprint and you know kind of get like that you know maybe a better version of the photo that you remembered so shooting raw that's that's the the first and foremost uh most important setting next up white balance it doesn't really doesn't really matter what white balance you are using but it's helpful if all if your white balance doesn't change throughout the night so i always suggest that you use what a manual white balance i tend to shoot with a daylight white balance it's just easy um it also kind of gives you an idea of how much light pollution you end up having if you're shooting daylight light pollution will tend to to appear fairly orange and that's actually what we calibrated our purenite filter to work with is we suggest using a daylight white balance that'll give you the most neutral uh shot out of camera it looks close to neutral shot out of the camera of course we can always change this later so you know if your shots are turning out too orange looking or too blue looking not to worry because you're shooting in raw so white balance is not super important now this with this next one long exposure noise reduction this one is particularly important for meteor shots and the reason being is that when a camera has long exposure noise reduction enabled it will actually take a second exposure with the shutter closed um and it does that in order to record the noise profile of the camera and then it subtracts it does like basically some math on your image and it reduces the noise in that way but the problem with that when shooting meteors is that if you're shooting a 20 second exposure it's only exposing for 20 seconds and then the camera will sit neutral idle taking that second noise reduction frame without capturing the sky at all so you have 20 seconds of time wasted that could have been capturing the meteors so it's very very important to disable this when you're trying to shoot the meteor shower turn long exposure noise reduction off for sure um other ones that are helpful to to um turn off or high iso noise reduction that's just sort of like a post-processing noise reduction that the camera can apply um after the photo is taken and it's essentially the same algorithm of noise reduction that is built into a program like adobe lightroom or adobe photoshop or a camera raw when you enable noise reduction on on those software um you have more control than you would in camera most cameras don't even have uh a way to adjust the noise reduction if you have it on uh in camera i'd say for a few i think like fujifilm uh has an adjustment for it but once it's baked into your file there's no unbaking it so it's better to just do it in post-processing if you're shooting in raw most of the time this setting won't apply it'll actually only apply to like the preview um so that's helpful but it depends on the camera so i would just suggest turning it off um and then uh the final setting in camera is that image stabilization uh turning it off if your camera has that enabled and you're shooting on a tripod there is the slight possibility that it could start to drift um during a shot and it could blur the stars it really depends on the camera and the lens but it's the safest thing to do is to turn that off and then finally the interval timer we talked about this earlier usually you want the interval to be about two seconds longer than the shutter and and then the other option that i had mentioned is where you could put your camera on continuous mode and just hold the shutter down with the hold uh the hold function on your uh on your remote um you know assuming that that's an option but the best thing is just to have a regular editable timer and program that interval in okay a couple last tips when you're out there and you're shooting in the dark things to think about minimizing the use of your headlamp this is more of a courtesy i guess if you're out there shooting with other photographers you know when you turn on a headlamp it's probably going to spill over into their photograph so anything that you can do to be prepared enough to not have to use that is very very helpful and so i always like to recommend that people know how to change a few things or know how to access a few things on their camera by feel one of those is is changing your camera lcd brightness being able to turn that down that's especially helpful for conserving power while you're shooting you know the brighter the lcd on the camera the more power it's going to end up using so you know figure out how to turn that down that way once you uh you know once you're set up and you've got your time lapse going you can turn down that lcd brightness just to make sure that your camera is going to last throughout the night i know that my sony cameras they leave the lcd on when it's shooting at time lapse there's like no way to turn it off so the best thing to do to save power is at least lower the brightness and one of the one of the tools that that i think is helpful one of the practices that you can do is see if you can figure out where your buttons are in your camera without looking at it like close your eyes and figure out like how to hit the playback button to check your focus um you know how do you zoom zoom in the live view uh in the dark without having to you know uh to actually see where the buttons are on your camera so you know sort of knowing the positions of those buttons and getting used to where they are by feel is an easy way to to be able to minimize your use of a headlamp while you're out shooting and one of the things that we always encounter uh when we're out on like workshops you know like for instance the photokills cam is uh tripods and this is this is like maybe the i would say the most important skill to know to preserve the value of your gear because uh it's very common for people to set up their tripod and have it tilted one way or the other and then they brush it or something as they're fiddling in their bag and they knock over their tripod and you know crack their lens or you know get dirt in their camera so get used to what it's like to actually level your tripod many tripods have a built-in bubble level or just just get used to doing it by eye if it doesn't have a level you you know you have a pretty good gauge just by eyesight of what's up and what's down so um you know get used to leveling your tripod uh because once it gets dark uh things get a little bit you know more difficult and the last thing that you want to do is accidentally uh have your camera fall over so yeah definitely definitely yeah we have a few questions here you don't mind oh yeah yeah sure uh thomas lolike is asking us if do you use like uh ordering dart frames um so uh that's a good question um for the meteor shower um you could take dark frames if you wanted to um you would want to do it after you're done shooting for the night like right after you finish um then you could you could capture some dark frames and so what thomas is talking about dark frames are a special type of exposure that we make after we do our shooting for the night we can basically put our our lens cap on our lens um and then start our interval timer again to take the same type of exposures that we were taking throughout the night they need to be the same settings the same shutter time and iso in particular and what these dark frames let us do after the fact in post-processing is we can combine those together and then subtract them from our image i'm not going to go into too much detail about that i i wasn't planning on doing that for our post-processing section of this presentation but it it it is a technique that can help um it's yeah i i wouldn't not suggest it but it's definitely not necessary for uh for this type of shooting so awesome awesome another question from miguel angel martin can we have any kind of noise due to overheating of the sensor um it's not something that you really have to worry about i mean you know if i speak sort of generically about cameras in general yes uh longer exposures tend to warm up the sensor and result in the occurrence of you know more noise that said uh most modern cameras are very very good at handling those situations i've shot time lapses with 30 second exposures that lasted eight hours you know on on a warm summer night um you know where it was like 90 degrees at night in the desert and i've had no issues um you know with the resulting photographs you will potentially see a slight increase in the amount of noise that you have but you know it's not something that i would say should deter you from going out and shooting you're definitely not going to damage your sensor um by shooting long exposures um yeah like i said i've shot you know hundreds of thousands of photographs on any given camera body all super long exposures and had no issues so not something to super worry about awesome awesome awesome before we jump into the the focusing how to focus and get everything sharp when do you take like the the bass photo when you take photos from the for the sky and also you take a photo for the foreground i suppose what's the best time to to shoot it uh some some people is suggesting it stony for example uh told me that you can take it during the astronomical dialogue before you start shooting what's your preference um uh i guess i'm trying to understand the question like um do you mean do you mean like a foreground like a separate foreground exposure is that what you're asking yeah yeah yeah so i wasn't planning on getting into uh doing exposure blending but um that is a technique where if you're in if you're in a place where the foreground is very very dark yeah and you're not you're not having uh you know you're having difficulty getting a lot of detail in that dark foreground then you can expose uh a much longer exposure first before you start your regular shooting um so that you can capture more detail in the foreground and so usually you were talking about something like in a very dark place it would be like a four minute exposure instead of 20 seconds and my preference if i'm doing an exposure blend which is not super common but if i am doing it i want to do it as close to the time of shooting um you know for the stars because i want i want the sort of natural balance of light um in there so i would tend to shoot for more of a uh you know still shoot while it's dark rather than blue hour just use a really long exposure uh you know like several minutes in order to capture you know what that scene looks like in the dark um but you'll see like a lot of photographers uh like to combine you know maybe the soft light of blue hour um you know around twilight where there's still a little bit of glow in the sky from the setting sun um you know that way they can get really really uh clean detail on the foreground um that does present some difficulties in matching colors and you know making sure that it looks natural um so uh you know that's a little bit more complex of a topic but i tend to like to shoot my foregrounds uh like at the same you know time of night essentially as as my base exposures for the night sky um but most of the time um i'm just using regular 20-second exposures and then i'll i'll i'll stack them together and we're going to do essentially a sort of form of stacking um uh when we do our our post-processing section of this class so perfecto okay so uh focusing uh like you mentioned uh there's some basic methods for um focusing at night um the first and foremost like the one that that is used most often on the fly is just using the live view of your camera you know using the the feed on the back of your lcd and zooming it in using the magnification function and zoom it in on on the brightest star that you can find in the sky so not worrying about your composition or anything just look around the sky find that brightest star and put it right in the center of your frame and then and then magnify that live view so that you can focus and uh you know you're basically trying to adjust your focus very gradually until you see the stars looking as pinpoint as possible and one of the things i like to mention is that it's it's often very helpful to um when you're when you're doing that when you're looking on your live view is don't necessarily look at just the brightest star see if you can see a few of the dimmer stars around it because if you're slightly out of focus those dimmer stars will start to disappear um so that can be like a secondary gauge for figuring out if you're in focus if you know like in in this case there's like a very dim star here that i can barely see when it's in focus but it's almost gone when i'm just very slightly out of focus so that's like a good gauge um for for for trying to find focus at night um the other one is to use some sort of tool to assist use a flashlight headlamp your friend your wife uh your husband have them uh walk out with a light uh at a you know fairly large distance um if they're greater than um about 100 feet or like 30 meters away um that's going to be far enough away that your focus point um if you focus on them it'll be pretty much the same as the stars and so that's a really good way to gauge infinity focus especially when you're shooting on a wide angle lens as long as it's far enough away you know if you have like a distant light to focus on that should be perfect for uh achieving good focus on the stars as well and then the last method is that tool that i had mentioned earlier um this is called the sharpstar um i don't know if can they can the stream see me on camera yes no so this is a you can see it's a very it's a clear piece of plastic it's a little hard to see it's basically a a focusing filter is what we call it basically it's a it's um it's based off of an idea used in telescopes called a batanov mask which is normally this piece of black plastic that goes over a telescope and it helps astronomers focus on the stars and so uh we actually essentially modified that idea and we invented a way to make a baton of mass work on a regular camera lens and so the sharpstar what it does is it has these etched lines in it and they use the concept of diffraction to essentially bend the light that's coming into the camera and what happens is it creates this set of spikes which you can see on the right side of the screen there around a bright star and i'll go ahead and show that a little bit closer so as i focus back and forth with my focus ring ring on my lens the spikes around the star shift and there's a central spike and then two outer spikes and the two outer spikes move differently than the center spike so as you focus you can align the spikes together and when they're perfectly aligned center to center then you're you have perfect focus so you basically uh slide this into your filter holder in front of your lens zoom in on the star and then adjust your focus until those spikes line up and then when you're done uh getting them lined up you just remove the filter and then go on shooting for the rest of the night and you'll have perfect focus on the stars every single time so we we sell this on lonelyspec.com um it comes in a few different sizes for different filter holders and um we also have a 100 guarantee on it so um because different lenses and different equipment all kind of have different ways of showing live view um there are a few uh you know cases where maybe this tool won't you know work perfectly for you um and if that's the case then we'll just give you you know we'll give you a refund you just send us an email um because you know we want to make sure that we can get this tool out to as many people as possible and you know i mean 99 of our customers love it um and so you know there's there's really no risk in trying it out definitely check it out on lonelyspec.com um yeah i i think it's a great tool we use it all the time and we have a ton of people that really love using it so uh yeah it's very clever because uh you're right i mean uh in the footballs camp any worship we do we see a lot of people having a really hard time to to to focus on the stars and getting the the stars in focus so this tool it seems like makes things uh easier the first time i i didn't know this you invented this this filter it's uh really surprising yeah yeah yeah it's uh you know i stand by it for sure it's it's a fun tool to use and uh it definitely you know works pretty well so that is nice bulking is the hardest it's the hardest thing um like it's something that uh you know even even after you know doing astrophotography for you know i guess how old am i now like almost two decades it's like uh it's one of those things where every once in a while you bump your focusing ring and you didn't realize it uh and then you go and you shoot a time-lapse and your whole time-lapse is out of focus um and so i have to constantly remind myself oh double check you know double check the shot because even if i use the sharp star and i did my focus if i did something like change my composition and i accidentally bumped that focusing ring on the lens um you know that can just completely destroy a night of shooting um so you know beyond just you know beyond using a special tool for focusing just scrutinize it you know just double check like go back and review your photo after you took it and just make absolutely sure that that's in focus because you don't want to go on and shoot another hour of it being out of focus yeah yeah especially for for the meter showers you really need to make sure that when you're taking your test shots you get everything uh you get the focus you want because when you start the camera you know you're stopping after four hours shooting and discover that your images are all blur yeah yeah it's definitely the most disappointing thing um it's funny too because like i i even even during um the photopills camp um there was one night where i set up a time lapse at the beginning of the shooting session and we had you know a bunch of workshop participants and i was like okay i'll just set up this great time lapse and you know i checked everything you know i thought i checked everything and i you know it's pretty confident and i must have bumped the focus ring and i started my time lapse and i went on to go help people for like two hours and i was so excited about that time lapse too and uh and it came back with nothing that night i mean luckily i helped you know help the other participants participants get their photos but i got nothing that night so yeah use your focus as often as you as you can um okay so uh yeah so lonelyspec.com that's where you can uh get that filter um and you can check out all of our tutorials obviously and if you want to follow kind of the lifestyle that um diana and i have uh and see you know stuff from our travels we haven't been traveling lately because of covid um but you can sort of you can check out all of that information on our travel blog which is north the south dot us um so are you going to uh release or post uh videos on your youtube channel because you also have like a lot of videos on youtube yeah um yeah well um youtube.com lonelyspec you can actually you can access that through lonelyspec.com we have all of our video tutorials there um everything's free and we actually just recently released an old uh post-processing workshop video on there and we have everything from like how to photograph the milky way in five minutes um to you know advanced uh you know stacking uh videos and and uh you know and then some just you know kind of more inspirational stuff about our travels you know to places like new zealand for example um so yeah definitely check out youtube.com uh lonely spec yeah yeah new zealand yeah such a great place to go and shoot the stars yeah yeah one of my favorites so i figured we could uh kind of shift you know we talked all about the shooting focusing um so i wanted to talk about processing next does that sound good that'd be great so uh this is the photograph that we're gonna try to try to make basically uh today and so i'm gonna go over here and uh and kind of show you what it took to create this photograph like i said there's about 20 or so meteors in this shot um and uh and so i want to show you kind of like all of the photographs that i took that night in order to try and make that shot so i've pulled them up here and i've selected some for you guys to see and i think if i select if i show you the ones that i selected uh let's see how many so i have 200 201 actually 200 exposures the one is is uh it's a separate edit so i took 200 exposures here that night and if we look at some of the data for this photograph oh it was actually a 13 second exposure so i can tell you um i probably shot 13 seconds and i probably had an interval of maybe 15 seconds so only about two seconds between each shot iso 6400 and i was using a manual lens so the lens data is not coming up on here i was actually shooting that night on a 24 millimeter lens which is considered a wide angle and i shot at f 2 i believe so fairly wide open trying to capture as much light as possible now the interesting thing about this you know these shots is that you know you don't see any meters in this exposure and i can actually scroll through all these exposures and you don't really oh wait there was one so scrolling through that time lapse that i took at night um you know it took a while before i even saw one meteor um like i think we're on uh we're on the 17th exposure i took that night and so at you know 13 seconds like i that's like several minutes that i had to wait before i actually got one meteor and it looked you can see that there was a car driving by at the same time and it lit up the the foreground of the cliffs so you know that sort of gives you like an idea of like what to expect when shooting a meteor shower you're not going to get a meteor in every single exposure that you're shooting it's going to be potentially infrequent you know might be every like you know in this case every 17th exposure um you might have long sections where there were no meteors if i scroll through here you can see like every once in a while a while a meteor flashes um there's there's one um and uh you can actually see i actually encountered a problem uh that night my lens started fogging up this may be something i should have mentioned uh in the equipment equipment section when we leave our camera outside at night it can cool down um very very cold and if there's any moisture in the air moisture likes to stick to cold things like cold glass kind of like if you have if you have a water glass with you know with ice water in it it starts to you know sweat or whatever that's all you know condensation from the air uh you know it's condensing on the cold surface of the glass and the same thing happens to our camera at night uh the camera can actually get colder than the air just because it's sitting out you know essentially looking out to space space sort of acts like a like a uh they call it a black body basically a black body radiator it sucks the heat out of things and so your camera can get very cold and then it can start to fog up and so i had an issue with fogging on this nice night and i didn't bring a dew heater which is a it's basically like a little band that you can put around your lens you can find them on like amazon.com or b h and you wrap it around your lens and it has a built-in heating element you plug it into a battery and it keeps your lens warm so i would suggest that in areas that are particularly cold or or particularly moist you know if it rained recently or if you're just in a humid environment a dew heater can be very helpful you know if you're shooting near the ocean for example like in menorca you're usually somewhere near the shoreline um dew heater can potentially be helpful on a cold night we usually talk all the time yeah it's not impossible so um uh yeah dew heater could be helpful i ended up i i realized that it was fogging up at one point because i saw a dew forming on the surface of the camera body and so at some point during that during the course of the thing between the exposures i quickly wiped my lens but you know if you anything you can do to prevent that would be uh you know helpful for sure so you know scrolling through you can see there's only a few little flashes of meteors every once in a while and then later in the night uh the moon starts rising and starts lighting up uh lighting up the foreground um and i i liked the real like that this very last exposure that i made uh that night i really liked the light on the foreground from the moon and the really blue parts of uh you know the blue sky so this is sort of like the base exposure that i wanted to use um to do my edits so what i do usually is i'll go through all my photos and i'll find the ones that have meteors in them and then i'll mark them on on lightroom with five stars or you know just just mark them somehow so um you can do that um you know when you're scrolling through photos and you find one with the media you just press five on your keyboard and they'll say set rating to fives and now it has five stars so i went through um ahead of time and i marked all the ones that have meteors in them and uh what we can do is we can filter our view we can actually go up here to this top toolbar and we can select attribute and then we can filter by five stars so now i have all of the frames that have meteors in them so there's one bright meteor in the middle there's a little tiny one there slightly on the left it's barely visible it's one on the top of the frame i don't really see that one there some of them are kind of small here's a brighter one in the middle so you can see you know i've marked where all these meteors are so now that we've had we have all those selected we want to bring those into photoshop so that we can combine them all together into a single exposure so i've selected all of those uh and i also have this final frame uh here which is uh you know the sort of base frame that i want all the meteors to be you know visible in and you know mostly because i like that foreground the way that it's lit up so i'm selecting all my exposures i just holding down shift and then clicking and then i'm going to right click and go to edit in open as layers in photoshop and this is going to take a minute here so maybe this could be a good time to answer a question because it has to load into photoshop and that might take a minute or two okay we have a few questions uh stephen morales is asking if you're using a tracker star tracker or no do you have an experience yeah i have experience using a star tracker i used to have one called a vixen polari and there's a whole bunch more on the market now from companies like ioptron or skywatcher and i personally don't use star trackers mostly because of the equipment burden i like to make sure that when i'm going out shooting i don't have to worry too much about my equipment and and um you know getting it like lugging it out to where i want to go um especially if the location is fairly remote um [Music] uh i'm i need to check on this for some reason it's not it's stopped loading let me uh bigger time yeah it only it only opened like a few i also have a i have a save file that i might be able to open if this is not working uh open layers in photoshop hopefully this works out anyway so with the star tracker um yeah for me it's like more of an equipment thing like i don't want to have to carry another piece of gear that's as heavy as my camera and lens that said they can be very helpful especially if you're if you want to shoot really long lens with really long lenses you know shooting nebula or uh you know even galaxies and stuff like that um you know the longer the lens that you have the more you have to worry about things like star trailing from the earth's rotation and so having a star tracker mount to mount your camera on tracks the stars it lets you do much longer exposures but for something like meteor showers it's definitely not explicitly necessary i wouldn't use it in my case i would just use a regular tripod great we have another question yeah from jamie feldman do you ever use light painting for the foreground or uh well in this case i inadvertently use somebody else's light painting because we had the cars driving by um so the answer is yes uh definitely sometimes um light painting is one that uh it can be very challenging um to get to look right and um and i would suggest if you want to do it if you know especially if you have a very dark foreground and you you uh you know you really want to kind of give it some some oomph um try and have your friend light paint for you bring a friend with you and try to have them stand to the side of whatever it is you're light painting or even slightly behind and the reason i say that is because of the way that light falls on things with a flashlight we're talking about a very small point of light and if it's too close to the camera it'll make that foreground the lit foreground look very very flat so it's much more helpful to have like a nice angle on that light so that that's the only suggestion that i would have if you do want to use light painting is try to find a nice extreme angle for that light and the best way to do that is with the help of a friend awesome do you have time for another question or take one more um i think just finished loading but let's take one more okay uh david caruso is asking is it possible to capture the nail wise comment and the purses together i would think so um i don't know what its visibility will be like in one week um because it is uh the comment is moving farther and farther away and um you know but but the neowise is still visible in the general direction of where the perseid radium point is and uh you know like the perseid if you're looking north the perseid radiant point will generally be slightly north east and then comet neowise will be slightly northwest so if you have a very wide angle field of view you could potentially get the radiant point and the the uh the comet in there but i don't know how bright it's going to be by the time we get you know to the peak of the perseids um but you know our cameras collect more light than our eyes so even if it's not visible with your eyes it might still be visible in your photograph so i i mean i would give it a try for sure um yeah i i i think it's possible um but yeah i think it depends on how bright the comet ends so great and we have one very good one and i want to ask it yes how can you tell uh meteors from satellites flares or yeah that's a really crash plane that's um because i thought about that uh when i was preparing my photographs and i was like i thought briefly i was like oh i should show a photograph that has like a plane in it or whatever but of course those photographs are like the ones that i don't care about ever because they're you know like ruined by the plane um it makes me wonder i don't know if i have anything prepared for it but okay using this photograph that we have pulled up here as an example um let me sort of show you what the typical meteor looks like they are very fast so they only last you know i mean if you've ever seen a shooting star that's what we're talking about um they only last a second or two you know half a second or a quarter second very very quick you know it's just like a quick blip across the sky and so if you see this streak in your photograph and that same streak shows up in the next photograph moving across the sky then it's definitely not a meteor because it's it's only usually um it's so fast that it's it's it can only sort of exist in one of your frames at a time and if it if it seems to go across multiple frames you know when you scroll through your time lapse uh then it's probably a satellite or a plane and so uh in the case of a meteor they tend to have this profile where they appear like they fade uh they fade in you know fairly dim and then they get bright in the center and then they fade out and that tends to be the case um sometimes you can get lucky if uh you know depending on how like large the meteor is or if it had like gases inside of it or something like that and then if it exploded you know like a fireball then sometimes you get a really bright blip in the center of the of the meteor i don't have any fireballs in this particular shot that we're working on but they tend to have that profile where they start dim get bright in the center and they get dim again and an airplane most often will look like a solid line of constant brightness and sometimes if you're looking really closely you can see the strobe lights on that on the you know like the anti-collision lights on the plane blinking so they'll make a little blinky trail across so that's kind of how you can tell if it's an airplane um so yeah that's the general uh the general gist of whether or not it's a meteor or not so looking at these photographs here you know we marked all our frames brought them into lightroom and uh i imported all of them into layers so looking over on the right side here you can see i've got all these layers in each of these layers i have a meteor somewhere and we want to sort of combine those together so that we can see them all in the same frame that we were capturing you know where all those meteors were for the night on the very bottom i'm going to show you my bottom layer i'm going to turn off all of these layers on the very bottom of our frame we have the frame that i want to use as sort of my base exposure the one that all the meteors are going to be brought into and so depending on on how you've imported your photos you might have a base layer that you prefer you know depending on the light of the foreground or you know just the look of the shot um bring that layer all the way to the bottom you know you can just drag the position of it bring that all the way to the bottom of your layers palette and just to make things easier i'm going to i'm going to rename this layer to base layer just so i know that that's the one that i'm trying to composite into so looking at all these different layers i'm going to turn them all back on again starting with the very first one this was one of our most obvious meteors and so what we're going to do is we're going to use a method called masking and we're going to mask in each meteor and i do this with sort of like a method of inverse masking where i'll add a layer mask and the way we do that is we select the layer in the layers palette so i've got the very top layer selected here the one that that we're viewing right now and i'll click this button all the way down on the bottom right corner that says add layer mask it looks like a rectangle with a little circle in it so when i click add layer mask it adds this little white rectangle next to our layer and that's our layer mask and uh everything that's painted in white on the layer mask you can see in the preview it has the it's everything is white everything that's white is visible and everything that's black is invisible so we're going to use a black brush so i'm going to go to the brush tool over here you can also select it by pressing b and i'm going to use a small brush and i'm going to go in on that meteor and i'm actually going to paint it away so what the way that i like to do is i click on one end of the meteor and then i hold down the shift key and i click on the end of the meteor and you can see that we've erased that meteor away if i show you the layer mask i can hold down alt or option and click on the layer mask you can see that we just painted a black line to erase that meteor so what we're going to do is now that that meter is erased we're going to select that layer mask and then we're going to invert it and by inverting it we're going to flip it around so that we can see the meteor again and there's two ways that we can do this the first one is we can do image adjustments and then invert um and that that's one way of inverting it the other way to to invert it is by just pressing command i or control i if you're on a on a windows machine so by pressing ctrl i that'll invert it and now we can see our media again so now what we're essentially doing is you can see that we've combined this top layer meteor with the layer underneath it and layer underneath it has this other small meteor right next to it so you can sort of see where we're going with this we're going to combine all these separate layers together and i'm going to try and run through this fairly quickly so that you guys see a breath um and uh you know i'll i'll talk about what i'm doing along the way so now that i've done that i'm gonna actually turn that layer off they don't start confusing meteors with each other so um to turn a layer off there's this little eyeball icon next to your layer i'm just going to click that and that turns that meteor off and i'm going to do the same thing with the next layer so i select that layer select the layer mask use the brush tool and with a shift you know click shift click i'm going to erase that meteor and then i'm going to hit command i or control i to invert it all done and then we're going to move on to the next layer i'll turn this layer off and then looking at this next layer it looks like the meteors up here i'll do the same thing add a layer mask paint it out invert it with control i and then turn it off nice yeah so so you can see it's it's a little bit time consuming um but uh you know i mean i only have 20 frames so it's like not too bad this particular frame here it doesn't have i think the meteor that i was i was looking at is this very very dim one here so i might not even include it so i'm actually going to just i'm just going to drag that one to the trash you know that particular layer i don't think it's really contributing here we have a meteor on this next layer so add a layer mask with the black brush click once on the end of the meteor and then hold down shift and click again on the other end of the meteor and then we can invert it and then turn that layer off awesome i think it's perfect the method you're following is twisted clear i mean you want to do it like a few more you're weak and then yeah yeah okay so here's this little meteor i added a layer mask to that layer uh clicking again holding down shift and then clicking and uh okay and then i i invert it once i'm done to make sure that that mask looks black command i and you can see you know when it's properly inverted when you when you see that the layer mask appears black on the layers palette there so let's go ahead and go through i want to do a couple more just find some of the the brighter ones here um so i'm going to go in there paint this one out and then command hi turn that off this is a good one adding a layer mask painting it out with a black brush command i and then turning it off this is a particularly good one adding layer mask to that and then using that brush to paint it out and then command i to invert it and then turn it off um okay so just to kind of give you guys a preview of where we're going all those layers that i turned off if i turn them back on you can see that now we have multiple meteors visible in the shot so you know that kind of gives you an idea of where we're going with this so if i do another one here nice and do you post process the whole all the images before you on in lightroom before you yeah did very basic i think i used one of the camera profiles on lightroom so i just did a very basic edit with some contrast but i didn't do a whole lot of edits in this case um i didn't really want to focus on that too much and you know just so that we could focus more on on this whole compositing method so some of these ones don't really actually just seem to have like really bright meteors so i'm going to skip them so we're actually getting through this fairly quickly and one of the things that that this workflow that i want to address is you can see as i advance through my frames the moon is rising and so my sky is getting bluer and bluer and you know that change presents a problem when we do these composites because in one case the sky is very dark black and the other case it's bright blue so when we combine them together we're going to have to sort of address the fact that the colors between each frame are slightly different and so that's one of the techniques that i want to go into here once we once we mask all of our meteors in so i'm just repeating if you guys are just joining uh the stream and you're wondering what the heck i'm doing i am finding each of the meteors in my in my layers so i have multiple layers here finding the meteor adding a layer mask to it painting out that meteor with a black brush inverting the mask and then and then turning off the layer and moving on to the next one so finding the meteor in the next frame adding the layer mask painting it out with a black brush using a shift click uh inverting that mask and then turning that layer off so we're just going through each frame trying to find all the meteors that i captured that particular night and you know these are this is a combination of uh of basically the 20 best frames or 20 or so best frames that i found from over 200 that i shot this particular night nice the process is super quick it's fast yeah it's you know i mean it seems a little the timing consuming here's where you can see actually an issue of where when i painted it out you can see the difference between the brightnesses in the layer underneath it and so that's something that we're going to start addressing here i think we have a very last meteor here thanks for bearing with us everybody um this is exactly the process that you're going to need to go through on your meteor shots if you want a similar type of shot uh compilation you have 800 people here watching you uh great great awesome life okay so now we're back down to our base layer so um we can see all of our our meteor shots have been masked out we have all have the black colored mask on each layer i'm going to turn all of those layers back on so i'm just clicking and dragging on the little eyeball icon and you can see now we can see all of our layers or all of our meters passed over our base layer and obviously something looks not right they uh the meteors that were taken earlier that night have like this sort of dark uh you know uh mask around it like a dark halo that's okay nothing to worry about as normal because we had that change in light because we went from a dark night to a slightly moonlit night we have these differences in our frames and so what we're going to do is we're going to make some adjustments so that that's not apparent anymore so what we're going to do is i'm going to select all of my layers i'm clicking on the bottom layer holding down shift and clicking on the top layer we're going to add them to a group so i'm going to drag all those layers down to this bottom thing here that looks like a folder and that's going to add them to a new group and i'm going to call this group meteors so you can see we have our base layer and then we have our meteors group and once we have the meteos group we're going to change a setting on it and that's called a blend mode so you can see right now the default blend mode for a group is called passthrough it says it right here at the top of the layers palette i'm going to drop that down and i'm going to select a different blend mode called lighten and what that's going to do is it's going to ensure us that only the bright exposed pixels are the ones that are visible uh you know from layer to layer um and that automatically makes the blending of the layer much more natural you know essentially what we see with the regular uh meteor exposures um and so you know that's how we combine all of them together that's the basic gist of it now i would do probably one last tweak on this particular shot before i bring it back into lightroom for my final edits and that would be to make a slight adjustment to the brightness of the meteors just to try and pull them out a little bit to make them more visible against this like blue moonlit sky and the way that i do that is by adding an adjustment layer so i'm using the adjustments palette here um if you don't see the adjustments palette you can find it with window and then adjustments and if you want to use a workspace that looks like mine i use the default workspace for photography so you can actually go to window workspace and then select photography and that'll have all the same uh you know layers palette the adjustments palette and the histogram on there for you so i'm going to use an adjustment layer called curves it's the third one on the list here so i'm going to just click that and that adds a layer to the layers palette called curves and it gives us the curves adjustment tool and normally the way an adjustment layer works is it applies to all the layers below it and i don't want to edit my base layer the base exposure i only want to edit the the meteors layer this is actually funny because this is a trick that i uh learned from michael shane bloom during the photopills camp you can apply adjustment layer to only one layer if you want to and i did not know this for the longest time i don't know how this like escaped me um but you can apply that adjustment layer to just the layer below it by holding down the alt key or the option key on the keyboard and if you hover your mouse in between the two layers you can see it it comes up this little icon with a little a square and a little arrow pointing down and once that's uh you know visible click just click between the two layers and it'll add that little arrow to the adjustment layer meaning it's only applying to the single layer below it in this case our group so any adjustments that we make will only apply to uh you know to that that group that uh you know happens to contain all of our meteors so what i'm going to do is we can now adjust the brightness of our meteor using this curves tool so if i bring up the brightness you can see it makes the meteors brighter i don't want to go too crazy because we start to see the brush strokes that i made to mask them in so we can actually pull down uh the shadows on the curves a little bit and try to you know come up with something that looks a little bit more natural uh while still you know brightening up the the overall look of those meteors just to make them slightly more visible and you know depending on your conditions you might have certain meteors that kind of look a little funky or you know might be slightly different depending on the lighting conditions you know i had changing light in my [Music] in my particular um uh you know shooting this night um and you know one of the things i see like this meteor this little tiny meteor in the center there is interfering with that larger one um so i think i actually want to try and remove that one so i'm going to go through and try to find out which layer uh that one is on so i dropped down my uh my meteors group and i'm just sort of turning on and off my layers here to try and see if i can find that little one i think it might have been one of the ones toward the bottom there it is very last one so i'm just going to turn that one off you know i didn't like how i was interfering with that one meteor so i'll just throw that one in the trash so now we have all those meteors there and it's just a matter of saving your your work um and since we opened that via lightroom uh once we save in photoshop it'll automatically bring that new save file into lightroom we can do some final edits on it but that is basically the gist of how to combine a whole nice worth of meteor shooting into a single frame so you get this classic looking meteor shower shot um awesome it's been great man i mean a super fast method of you know creating this uh image with all the meteors you captured that day yeah thanks for sharing it so you know yeah i hope i hope that was helpful everybody um i see a lot of comments in the chat so i think people are very happy yeah great great um well i'd be happy um i think to take any more questions that anybody has particularly about shooting meteors um this workflow that i showed you guys is a slightly simpler one um i know it wasn't you know it wasn't ultra simple but it's as simple as i could make it there are several other methods actually if you um uh if you're a spanish speaker and you check out the other photopills uh master class that was done by uh antoni claudera um it's it's all in spanish he uses a fairly similar method but he also does something where he uh he actually rotates all the meteors to be relative to their position of the stars so that they all appear to radiate from the same point and so he talks about that method in the uh in his master class i didn't want to go into that much detail especially if you guys are just starting out and you're shooting your very first meteor shower um i think this method's a little bit simpler you know and and hopefully isn't too overwhelming of a post-processing technique for you guys to try yeah and if you want to check what antoni did you can go to the spanish version of this master class we just published it on on tuesday and in the description of the video you have a uh index time with the minutes and there is uh that you'll find the time where he's doing the post processing and even if in spanish you can follow it we have a lot of questions asking us how can you rotate the meteors and you know create a that image you have it there unless you if you want to do it here and feel free to do it yeah i can show it real quick um we've been here for one hour 40 minutes 43 minutes so yeah so um in order to do this uh to do this demo um i'm gonna just go ahead and show um i'll show a couple frames awesome um and uh so i'm gonna sort of step back here and undo some of the work that i showed you during the post-processing section uh again and get rid of my layer masks here okay so in this case i've got uh [Music] maybe this isn't the best layer let's try to find try to find a good one with a good meteor in it um oh i need to i need to step back in a minute here bear with me everybody let me get this in a state where i can actually show you what's going on uh [Music] by the way eric saying hi uh hi eric uh yeah and happy uh fifth tooth tribe anniversary yeah if you guys aren't familiar uh with eric parade um he and kim henry make these amazing shots uh using light painting with tubes uh you can i i guess i don't i don't know what their their website is off the top of my head share it in the chat eric because i think everybody should check this out um it's uh it's pretty amazing his uh the tutorials and youtube channel that he has here are just uh super helpful and you know just some amazing resources for learning how to do these amazing night photos uh with with uh light painting tubes um okay i found two frames that i like okay so let's forget eddie for a while yeah uh so if you guys want to um maintain the position of the radiant point between your shots there's an extra step that you can do in the post-processing in order to try and maintain the relative position of the meteors to their position uh in the sky relative to the stars if that makes sense sorry that was a mouthful so the way that we do that is by rotating or transforming our layers so that they are aligned with the stars before we do our our masking of the meteors so we have this this one frame here where we have one meteor and i want to combine it with this top layer here but you can see between the two frames the sky you know appears to have moved because the earth was rotating so uh what we want to do is we want to sort of manipulate one of the layers so that the skies line up before we do our composite and the way that we do that there's a couple different ways you can do it one of them is you could lower the opacity of the upper layer and i'm going to i'm going to delete these these other layers just to move them out of the way so you guys can see what i'm doing um so i'm working with these two top layers and on the top layer here i'm going to lower the opacity to around 50 percent and so now we can see what's going on we can sort of see here's one meter here and then here's the other meteor here and you can see they're rotating all about the central point this happens to be the north star and if you guys are shooting the perseids next week and you want to include the radiant point if you remember in the planning phase the radiant point for the perseids was actually just a little bit to the right of the north star as you're looking at the north starts to to the northeast when you're looking north so you're going to be shooting roughly towards the north star anyway and if you're shooting with a wide angle you'll probably have the north star in your frame so this is a really good example of what to expect for the perseids if you want to do this type type of compositing so what we're going to do is we're going to press command t or control t on the keyboard and that's going to enable the transform mode you can also find that through i believe layer and then is it under layer whereas i always go off with the hot keys here um [Music] actually don't even know where it is for transform let's use a hot white layer yeah command t command t or ctrl t on the keyboard anyway so command t that that that opens up our transform mode and you know we get this box um and what we want to do is uh people just commenting that is in the edit menu it's in edit okay yeah yeah edit transform free transform that's what we want okay thank you thank you uh audience so um when we enable transform make sure you have this check box checked up on the top toolbar that gives you the central point of the transformation and we can move that central point around the image and we want to move it over to that north star so it's very helpful that we have that in our in our shot and so now if we bring our cursor over to the outer periphery of the frame we can see it transforms into this little um little arrow like two directional arrow so that if we hold down drag and click it lets us rotate our frame and so we just want to rotate it until our stars roughly line up so i'm sort of looking over at uh andromeda here this really bright thing in the sky it's actually another galaxy as kind of my gauge we don't need to get it perfect you know we just kind of need to get it roughly lined up and so now that that's aligned i can just hit enter and it'll complete the transformation i can return the opacity of our layer back to a hundred percent and then i can use the same masking method that we used before which is where i select the layer add the layer mask by pressing this add layer mask button down in the bottom of the layers palette and then i'll switch over to the brush tool and i'll go in here and i'll just paint out our whoops make sure i have this yeah paint out our meteor here you can see there's something weird going on here and i'll show you what's going on so after you paint it out we invert that layer mask so with the layer mask selected i hit command i or control i to invert it and you can see what happened here given that the earth was rotating and the sky appeared to move behind the horizon that position of that particular meteor um had it been in the you know occurred at the same time as uh as the upper meteor here it actually would have been slightly behind our uh our glyphs and so um you know in this case it's sort of appearing over uh and so you know it's it's it's one of the uh what would you call it an artifact of our compositing and the fact that you know the sky moves between our frames um that's okay um you know obviously we don't want it to look like that because that's not how it actually was um so we can go into the uh have with the layer mask selected um we can actually modify our mask so it doesn't show up like that so um using a black brush i have black selected and i've got the brush tool selected we can just paint over with the layer mask selected i you know i have not the layer itself but the mask i have it selected i'm just going to paint out that area where the meteor is is going over the edges of the cliff and so you know that's like the basic of compositing and then so you would follow that workflow for each and every layer uh you know adjusting to your base layer you know doing the rotation masking it in and then if you remember i did uh i did that final mask uh of of all the layers together i'm sorry i did the final group of all the layers together so i select all those layers add them to with a group and then change the group blending mode to lighten and then we can add our you know our adjustment layer to uh to just the group just to you know adjust the brightness of our of our meteors and try to get it to where you know it looks uh natural um and that's uh that's kind of the the gist of it yeah so if you did that with every single layer and you included the radiant points uh in your image you know using photopills find the reading point in your you know include that in your composition all of those meteors would appear to move from a single point in the image and if you check out yeah the spanish version of this master class with antoni um you can see that in his composition his composition included the radiant point awesome and you did a great job showing the whole process and i think everyone everybody is super happy now great great did any are there any last questions before we close or do you we're good to go we're done with uh most of them and i i know you're busy i don't want to take more time from you nearly two hours now so yeah yeah uh i mean uh it's been great here i don't know what to say it's been a fantastic class where people can can thank you i mean you mentioned loneliness spec.com yeah um you know uh yeah lonelyspec.com is the best place i mean that's where you can find our uh you know just all of our tutorials and you'll find links to like our instagram and and all that stuff um so you know you can follow us there um and then try you know find our travels on north to south um i can bring that up here uh yeah yeah so those two websites um you know visit us there uh we've got contact info if you guys run into any you know pressing questions or whatever and you know send us an email um it's all on it's all on those websites so awesome so guys you know where you find you can find ian and diane actually i want to take this opportunity to send a big kiss to diane who is watching you ian yeah yeah she's here uh and this big this has been great uh any last words you want to say before we say goodbye i mean thank you so much for you know uh for organizing this and and putting together the stream and everything like that you know this is i think it was really fun i had i had a fun time putting together the uh you know my workflow for the post-processing because um it's actually something that i haven't talked about directly on lonelyspec.com um so you know i'm glad to have uh been able to put you know put that workflow together and share it with everybody um you know i hope it was straightforward enough for everybody and uh if it isn't shoot me an email and ask a question so i could follow you easily so yeah you did a great job for sure great well thank you so much rafa a lot of people a lot of people from the photopills camp is saying hi to yeah everybody okay thank you thank you thank you everybody for staying here with us and uh that's it guys this is how you can you know imagine plan and shoot the first day is next next uh next week and i wish you a good look if you like this video give us a like and subscribe to the channel click on the bell you want to get notified when we release the next video which is going to be next week i hope and yeah as always remember that you have the power to imagine plan and shoot legendary for us bye bye thanks rafa bye everybody thank you bye bye thank you everyone

Channel: PhotoPills

Views: 38,911

Keywords: perseids calendar, perseids photography inspiration, perseids photography composition, perseids photography planning, perseids photography camera, perseids photography lens, perseids photography settings, perseids photography, how to photograph the perseids, perseids photography aperture, perseids photography focal length, perseids photography tutorial, ian norman astrophotography, ian norman photography, lonely speck astrophotography, perseids photography for beginners

Id: WlR-XrDhRIE

Length: 116min 28sec (6988 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020