PHOTOGRAPH THE MILKY WAY: Settings, gear, finding a location, processing, start to finish.

[Music] it's spring and it's the beginning of milky way season i'm on location in rural canada and i'm going to teach you to shoot the milky way hello everyone and welcome to my latest video i'm here doing one of the things i love the best and that's shooting milky ways first let's talk about what you're going to need you're going to need a headlamp or some kind of means to see in the dark you're going to need a camera preferably one with interchangeable lenses full frame is a little bit better than a crop sensor camera you're gonna need a lens you're gonna need a wide fast lens and by with that i mean you need a lens of 24 millimeters or maybe 28 millimeters or wider so you want 28 24 20 18 16 14 millimeters wider is better as it will allow you to take longer exposures without the star straightening we'll be talking about that later you also need a fast lens you on a lens of f 2.8 preferably or faster f2 this happens to be a sigma art series 20 millimeter 1.4 lens and a 1.4 lens lets in four times more light than an f 2.8 lens and you're also going to need a tripod because we're going to be taking long exposures if you don't own a fast wide lens i can give you an easy recommendation for your first lens if you're going to go and buy one i'd recommend the rokinon 14 millimeter 2.8 lens it's a manual focus lens so it's maybe less useful during the daytime but for nighttime photography it's plenty sharp and manual focus is how we shoot astro photography and milky way photography anyway so that's not an impediment now let's talk about the conditions you need first you need no moon the moon will wash away your milky way there are plenty of websites and apps that will allow you to find out what moon phase is you can shoot around new moon or right before or right after if the moon has just set or the moon hasn't risen yet let's talk about the time of year spring to fall is what's called milky way season it's not that the milky way isn't visible during the winter it's that from the spring to the fall is when the best part of the milky way the core of the milky way is visible above the horizon it makes for best photography you also need a clear sky you can have a few clouds going through your frame and actually won't ruin your milky way shot necessarily to have a cloud or two in there but for the most part you want a clear night now the next condition is having a dark sky there are two types of light pollution the first type of light pollution is is macro or broad scale or city scale light pollution this is the light pollution that comes from cities and towns and for man-made lights you can find light pollution maps online like light pollution map dot info that will show you a light pollution on a broad scale and will give you hints as to in which direction to drive or go to get away from this light pollution then there's smaller scale light pollution right at the site where you want to take your photo house lights and street lights are the common culprits here you want to try to get away from those you want to get away from this light pollution for your scene to be dark and for the skies to be dark there are also tools that you can use for planning your milky way shots one of my favorites is photo pills photopills is an app that allows you to know the position of the milky way at any given time as well as understand sunset sunrise times moon phases and so on next you should find a subject for your milky way the milky way is in the south in the spring it's in the southeast mid-summer and south southwest by september and october you should find a subject that faces south so when you're looking towards a milky way the subject will be in front of the milky way or below the milky way usually rustic subjects will work well for milky way shots this would be an old car an old barn a path an old building a lake and its reflection when it's not windy is also a great subject to put in your milky way photo it's best to look for compositions during the daytime if you're at night looking for compositions and you're away from any source of light and light pollution it's not possible to see interesting things to put in a milky way photo now it's time to look at settings now there's a few things we can do with our camera even before we leave the house i like to turn my brightness down on canon cameras the brightness of the back lcd is on a seven point scale i like to turn it down to two if you leave it bright your images will look really bright you'll think you'll have them well exposed even if you're underexposed putting your brightness down will give you a much more realistic view of what your exposure looks like also i recommend putting your white balance in manual and putting it at something like 3 800 kelvin you can leave it in automatic if you're shooting in raw and adjust it later but if you're taking multiple exposures your white balance may change between exposures and make it harder to blend photos together i also recommend putting the two second timer on your camera or bringing a shutter release pressing the shutter button on long exposures risks making your images blurry and shaking the camera okay let's talk about settings first thing i recommend strongly shooting raw your camera will have more dynamic range and you'll better be able to process your photos if they were shot in raw i recommend shooting your lens wide open that is at its widest aperture we're going to be shooting in the dark you need all the light you can get so shoot your lens wide open as for your iso milky way photos are shot at very high isos if you have a full frame camera you want to be shooting your iso between 3200 and 6400 to start off and you can experiment using those if you're shooting a crop sensor camera probably between 1600 and 3200 is best the next part is the exposure length now here we're trying to balance two things it's a very dark scene so shooting longer exposures collects more light the problem is the milky way moves and as it moves your stars will streak if your exposures are too long a handy rule has been developed to try to calculate what the maximum exposure length you can shoot without streaking your stars is and it's called the 500 rule on a full-frame camera take 500 divide it by your focal length and it will give you the number of seconds that you can shoot without your stars streaking so for me i have a 20 millimeter lens 500 divided by 20 gives me 25 so 25 seconds is the longest i can shoot now with higher megapixel modern cameras if you pixel peep a lot and look into the details even at 25 seconds i will get some streaking so i will often shoot my lens at 15 or 20 seconds for crop sensor cameras they effectively have more magnification and hence you can't shoot as long before the stars will streak you should use the rule of 300 so for a 20 millimeter lens 300 divided by 20 would give you 15 seconds the next thing to do is focus your camera and this is actually one of the most challenging things to do in milky way photography the challenge is that the infinity mark on most lenses is not particularly accurate and you can't trust that that will give you a sharp focus so there are two main methods to focus to infinity for milky way photography the first is to shoot at something at infinity during the daytime and take a note of where the infinity marker is compared to the mark of where the camera is focused you can then use a pen a marker or make a mental note of where the infinity marker is so you know where infinity focus is then turn your auto focus off you want to have your lens in manual focus so it doesn't try to auto focus on you while you try to take your photos the other technique is done at night while you're getting ready to shoot your milky way photos focus at a bright star or a distant light make sure your lens is in manual focus hit the magnify button to magnify the star on your back lcd as much as you can and then manually focus until the star is sharp at that point make sure you don't touch the focus knob again okay welcome back it's gotten uh dark out now and the milky way has risen behind the church that's going to be my target so the first thing we need to do now is set up the camera as i mentioned earlier to make sure we're ready to take our shots so let's uh let's go to the back of the camera and change a few settings there to make sure we're all ready to go okay now we're gonna change the camera settings to make sure we're ready to take our photos we're gonna put the camera in manual mode then for shutter speed i'm going to set that here uh to be about 20 seconds i like it a little bit shorter than the rule of 500 to make sure my stars are really sharp i'm going to set my aperture wide open to f 1.4 right here i'm gonna put my iso at 3200 here okay now it's time to focus the camera which can be one of the more tricky things to do as i mentioned earlier we'll make sure that our lens is set to manual focus and not on auto focus i'm going to point the camera at the brightest star in the sky i'm going to magnify using the magnify button and i'm going to magnify on that star as brightly as i can you see here if i make it out of focus on both sides of the focus point it gets larger the trick here is to continually move it back and forth until you get the finest point that you can and that will be the place where it is in tightest focus for me that's about right there okay now it's time to start framing our shot if you put on the level on your camera it's helpful to help frame the shot because it's very difficult to know what level is in the dark there we go i'm level now i'm just going to take a test exposure and see if my framing looks appropriate now let's have a look at that exposure and to see what we think there so that looks uh pretty interesting i like the composition i like the church on the left hand side and the core of the milky way on the right you'll notice that there's a little bit of a light streaming out of the basement of the church i actually think that adds a lot to the photo by having a little bit of a mysterious light coming out of the basement of the church there's also a light on in the church actually in one of the windows which actually adds a beautiful effect so i think that is looking good right now i'm going to take another exposure or two just to double check and make sure that all my shots are looking okay and you can see here that my stars are fairly sharp a little bit of streaking because on these high megapixel cameras there actually is a little bit of streaking even if you use the rule of 500 that's looking pretty good but you will also see that the land is very dark the land and the church are very dark now when we process this photo i'll be able to raise the shadows of the land and the church i'll lower the brightness of the sky so it matches a little bit more you'll be able to see the milky way better and that will still make a decent photo so let's go back home look at these on the computer okay we're back home on the computer now this isn't going to be a detailed astro photo processing tutorial but i did want to give you a quick peek on what's possible so i'm going to zip through this very very quickly now this photo was shot with an f 1.4 lens which lets in maybe a lot more light than your lens might so i'm going to reduce the exposure here just to show you what your photo might look like it might look something like this so let's use this as a starting point i'm going to raise the exposure i'm going to raise the shadows a bit so the foreground shows up a bit lightroom's got a wonderful new feature now where i can select the sky after the sky is selected i can process the sky separately and that's a big tip for milky way processing is to process the sky and the land differently because they're much different exposures so i'm going to lower the exposure increase the contrast increase the clarity a bit not too much it makes it look a bit crunchy when you do i like my sky my milky way photos to bit a bit on the blue side so i'm going to lower the color temperature i'm going to dehaze this a bit which will just cut through some of the light pollution and make the milky way pop out a little bit more you can add a radial gradient here for the milky way section of your photo and just apply a few adjustments selectively i'm going to increase the exposure increase the contrast maybe raise the whites a bit but lower the shadows and the blacks so that the milky way pops out a little bit more of course if you overdo any of these it won't look very natural so you have to use a bit of caution i like to put a linear gradient on the top of my photo to make it a little bit darker coming from top and lightening as it goes down i use contrast to do that and not exposure otherwise my stars will also get dark i also do the same thing from the bottom i like putting a little bit of a linear gradient on the bottom and darkening the bottom a little bit and the church because it's underexposed looks a little bit flat i'm going to add a radial gradient on the church and there raise the shadows a bit raise the exposure a bit maybe add a bit of warmth to give it a little bit of color and maybe i'll add a little bit of vibrance to the photo overall as well as add a little bit of a vignette a very gentle one and there you go there's a very basic view of how you can do some processing on your milky way photo i hope i gave you the tools to go at your very next outing that there's no moon and clear skies to go out and take your first milky way photo i hope you enjoyed it let me know in the comments which of these tips help you the most and if you've got any more questions if you like this type of content please like and subscribe i'll see you next time

Channel: Simon d'Entremont

Views: 186,878

Keywords: MIlky way photography, Milky way, Photography, Stars, Milky way photography, Landscape photography, R5, Canon R5, Nightscape, photograph milky way, milky way photography settings, milky way photography tutorials, milky way photography settings canon, photograph stars, milky way photography tutorial, milky way photography for beginners, milky way photography dslr, milky way photography without star tracker, milky way photography editing, milky way photography for begginers

Id: hz0fcW7rcpg

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022