Single, Stacked or Tracked - Milky Way Photography

[Music] [Applause] well hello there everybody great to see you back here on the channel now you can see it's a beautiful crisp summer night here it's just turned 3:00 so I'm out here again to shoot the rising milky Galactic core now the subject of today's video is that I am going to do something people have been asking me to do for literally years I am going to do some comparisons between shooting single exposure shots of the mooki way down there I'm going to do stacked tripod mounted shots of the Milky Way and then I'm going to do tracked shots of the Muki way I'm going to use the same 4 grand subject this beautiful Silo have a look down the back there for the foreground and I'm going to compare the three methods because you know there's a lot of confusion out there about uh which is the best way to shoot my nightscape photography and you know this video may or may not clear that up but at least it's going to go a little bit of the way down the track to help us all understand why do we go to the extra trouble to do St tracking and for some occasions and for some people you don't even need to do that that's exactly what this video is all about but firstly let's have a look at this subject let's look at the sky and let's see what's happening I'll tell you what it is really really warm mid2 Dee temperatures Celsius here I've got the short sleeves going uh it is really really warm bugs everywhere and that's something I absolutely hate Australian summer we haven't had a hot summer until this week here where I live and it's going to be 37° tomorrow so I'm sort of bit of rest bite here tonight I suppose but anyway let's get into it and we'll have a bit more of a chat about what we're going to do in the settings the camera where I'm going to set up Etc tell you what the bugs here are driving me crazy ah it's a trade-off you have with this hot weather it's a trade-off I really would prefer not to have I'd much prefer it to be 10° cooler but it is what it is anyway here is my camera my standard camera that I'm going to use for every single shot so this is a Nikon Z6 Mark I it is a hydrogen Alpha modified camera and I'm shooting it with the Nikon 20 mm f1.8 s Mount the native Zed uh system and I'm going to use the same camera and lens for everything I'm just going to move it around to whatever composition I'm looking at shooting so firstly I'm going to concentrate on just single exposure shots of The Silo I may do uh Panorama we'll just see what the time brings me it's really clear sky really calm condition conditions here perfect for shooting uh there was a little bit of a forecast for a bit of cloud coming in later so I've just got to keep on top of that because what but I don't want to get to the stage where I I get to the end and want to set my tracker up and so forth and it's cloudy or something like that so I got to keep moving but that's what I'm going to do and I'm just going to put my tripod over here uh I'll just do a bit of preliminary um setting up as far as composition I think composition is the most important factor when it comes to shooting any form of Photography and why would nightscape photography be any different to that so the way this Silo is set up the mooki way is going to rise over the top of it but over towards the left side and there's more space there so it's almost like I can compose the scene so that the main foreg Grand subject is a little bit more to the right side and the Milky Way is a little bit more to the upper left side and that's exactly what I'm looking to do so I'm going to take my tripod over there set it up and we'll go from there now just talking about composition one of the things I want to point out to us when we're shooting our nightscape photography okay what we tend to do is get carried away about the Milky Way where's the Milky Way we've got to find the Milky Way but you know I think yeah that's important but I think we should look at this from a different angle and the way I look at things is like this where is my foreg grand subject how do I best make that look good in the photo you know a wise old photographer said to me many many years ago he said to me Richard if the image looks good it's a photograph looks good compositionally just press that shutter button get the shot and I've remembered that all these years now I've just been walking a little bit around here looking for the best composition on the building now if I go over there a little bit too far there's some trees over the other side on the the right hand side of that building that show I don't want those trees because they're breaking the lines of the shed over here now if I go too far that way then I'm going to going to lose the separation between The Silo bins down there I can see a bit of Sky through there and that actually defines the 4 grand subject and that's what I want to do now this is a fairly complicated for Grand subject because it's got a number of sheds there there's about two or three silos back there I can't possibly get every aspect of it from one angle but I'm doing my best to do that so clean lines as much as possible now I know you're going to say to me look sometimes there's trees I can't get rid of trees of course you can't just do your best that's all any of us can do so by moving my camera around and that's what I'm doing now I'm just moving it into different positions lining up the building here primarily and then I'm thinking to myself where is that Mook way going to go into now that comes into our planning before we even get here we can work all this stuff out but while I'm here I can see the mookie way up there is clear as day and probably you can as well behind the building and there's plenty of space so this is negative space over here on the left hand side of the image that Milky Way is going to rise up into that quite beautifully so I better get going I've got to shoot some shots here I'm going to shoot some single frames going to shoot some stacking and I'm going to shoot a panorama just on the tripod then I'm going to get the tracker out and do some shots there so I've got to get moving let's get into it now you can see over there behind me there's a fair bit of light pollution on the distant Horizon there it's not lighting up the sky at all which is great but it's actually lighting up this building I don't have to do any light painting here I can just sweep across do my images my Panos and everything else just by using the ambient light that's coming from that hill over there and for this composition I find that to be absolutely [Music] perfect [Music] all right so in case you're wondering my settings I'm shooting with the 20 mil lens wide open at f1.8 for a lot of these shots and then I stopped down to f2.2 now you're going to ask me okay what's your reasoning for that well the reality is I want as much light Gathering Power as I possibly can get so if you're shooting single shots um and you've got a lens that opens up to f1.8 and it's pretty sharp at f1.8 go for it see how you go because it's going to capture a lot more light in a lot less time now I stopped down to f2.2 as well for the um Panorama that I shot here and the reason for that is a little less vetting now vetting is an enemy of Panorama so that's the black edges you get around each frame so stopping a lens down will minimize that a little bit so that's my Reckoning uh I'll probably do a similar settings on my tracker just to keep things fairly consistent but I often stop this lens down to f2.8 because it will become sharper at f2.8 any lens becomes sharper when you stop it down a bit but in a situation where I want as much lot Gathering Power as possible when I'm not doing light painting or anything like that opening up the aperture will always give you that Advantage oky dokie well I've got my star tracker set up here skywatcher star Adventurer this is the 2i version I set it up with my quick polar alignment method which I've got plenty of videos about works great using the Sky Safari app got my Nikon Z6 Mark I 20 mil f1.8 but my problem is I don't know if you can see in the background clouds the clouds are coming across now it's a high level cloud reasonably thin but it's going to interrupt my image particularly the Pano I'm shooting a panorama two row Pano right across uh from one side to the other so when you see the the comparison between the track shots and the non-tracked shots that's going to come into the equation because there wasn't any Cloud here when I was shooting the non-tracked images before but nevertheless I'm going to continue on um and I'm going to shoot using the tracker here just get it plugged in I'm using a USB power bank to power the tracker I worked out from previous occasions out that only certain power Banks actually work or keep working is what I should be saying so this one does it's funny because it's a cheap one it's not even one of the more expensive ones who would know but anyway look it's still a great time out here it's quite warm um so I'm going to get these there's a big heavy Cloud over there now so I might just have to wait a little bit and just see how we go with that well you know when it gets cloudy nothing else is working out for me the old cup of tea is going to I'll tell you what the last time I came out I didn't bring a cuper with me and I missed it I tell you I am starving so let's get into that I'll just try and wake these clouds out oh don't you hate that I've just put my tea bag in and dropped the cord so it's all wet oh man oh man clouds now I'm dropping my tea bag in my cup it's all happening out here oh hang on maybe just maybe there's a little bit of clear sky on the way anyway I think I've still got time to have this kapper well I'm going to have it anyway all right well one of the real pleasures in life you know is to just relax under the stars with a cup of tea now I learned many many years ago that there are a lot of frustrations when doing nightcap photography and tonight the clouds have come across that's a frustration but I tell you what this chalk chip biscuit is going to alleviate some of that pain especially when I dunk it in here now it's not a rumball but it's the next best thing oh man bugs are attacking me now cuz I turn the lights on that's another frustration but hey I'm just going to take some deep breaths relax and enjoy this okay so I've waited a while taken the shots that I can I've done my best with these track shots now there's quite a bit of cloud around nothing I can do about that uh so as far as the settings go what I did I shot this at f2.2 for the majority of these tracked shots and some I shot at 60 seconds some at 30 seconds now I want you to remember one of the main advantages of using a star tracker is that you can extend your shutter SP boots now the limitation on a tripod mounted camera when shooting the stars is shutter spot because the stars are actually moving across the sky when you use a star tracker that alleviates that problem because the star tracker follows the Stars across the sky of course uh the the foreground becomes blurred and therefore you have to work out how to blend foregrounds with the sky but for the sheer concept of taking the photographs themselves the shutter speed can be lengthened out uh depending on polar alignment but because there were clouds in the sky I decided to limit my shutter speed to 30 seconds because I wanted to get through it quicker it's as simple as that I shot that at ISO 1600 f2.2 30 seconds then I shot some singles uh one minute shutter speed when I had some clear sky over the top of theit Milky Way in The Silo now by the way the silo is about 200 M down the road there I've come back here to this clear open place to shoot my track shots and I always do that the last thing I want to be doing is trying to blend in odd shapes around a silo with a blurry foreground that's just not something I want to even look at but back here The Silo is a small subject in the background so I can quite easily hide that behind the foreground anyway uh I don't know how this is going to go I'm going to hang around here but it's it's pushing 5:00 in the morning it's not far from sunrise and of course the sky over there in the in the East is going to start getting really bright and I'm going to lose any opportunity for shooting any more nightscapes tonight but we'll just hang around a bit longer and just see what happens well as you can clearly see behind me there the dawn is approaching very rapidly it's about 6 a.m. and there's a very warm breeze blowing on my back here it's going to be about 37 38° C here today I am not looking forward to that believe me but anyway what can we glean from our experiences out here tonight by the way I'm going to show you the images in a minute but firstly single shots is that a valid way of shooting a scene like this and I can tell you what this is the perfect scene to be shooting a single shot nice dark clear skies and a little bit of ambient light on the foreground so basically all you have to do with the single shot is come out here with a camera and a tripod uh put it on its its uh best settings and as I showed you before I think that's fairly wide open apertures and just click the shutter button easy as that and as far as stacking goes well that's pretty much the same you just take a whole heap more of the same thing um and so what's the advantage of using a star tracker there's a lot more mucking around of course there is because you got to set up a Tracker you got to a polar or a line uh and then you got to do the shots and then you got to blend in a for Grand they're the disadvantages the advantage is really one thing and that is we can extend our shutter speed so by extending our shutter speed we can actually lower our is so and by doing all of those things we will get sharp crisp High dynamic range we will get uh less noise and it's just a a a valid way of getting the the best possible image of the sky but let me tell you this it makes no difference to a 4 grand in fact it complicates the whole 4 grand uh immeasurably so as far as shooting the 4 Grands here you know for a lot of people it's going to be a much better option just to come out here and do the single shots or stack you'll see I did a panorama of single shots I also did a panorama of tracked shots so You' be the judge I'm going to show you the images now I want to know what you think and I want to hear your feedback Down Below in the comments section so anyway until I see you in the next video I want you to have a fantastic week if you're in Australia in this hot weather just bunker down put the air conditioner on if you're overseas in cold weather well I'll look forward to seeing you anyway doesn't matter all right have a great week guys I'll see you in the next [Music] [Music] video [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] just before I finish this video I just have to make a comment on the comparison between these three images and you can see the single one on the top left tracked on the bottom and stacked now the tracked image has the highest dynamic range but it is so close between the tracked image and the Stacked image the majority of people wouldn't notice the difference unless you put them right side by side and I have to say that the single image is also quite beautiful considering how easy that one was to take so this has prompted me to definitely do a editing video regarding taking single frames and I'll show you exactly how I edit that image to get to the result that we've got here so look out for that video in the next week or so thanks again for [Music] watching

Channel: Nightscape Images

Views: 30,510

Keywords: nightscape images, nightscape photography, milky way timelapse tutorial, milky way photography, astro timelapse settings, astrophotography, light painting photography, light painting, richard tatti nightscape images, richard tatti photography, Richard Tatti, night photography settings, night photography tips and tricks, star tracker, astro landscape photography, sky watcher star adventurer 2i, sky watcher star adventurer mini, sky watcher star adventurer 2i polar alignment

Id: iI09f6v33nQ

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024