Super Telephoto Moon Pic Tips and stacking to reduce noise

[Music] hey everyone today I want to provide you all with some simple tips to help you out with super telephoto photography for today's tutorial I'm going to show you how I got some crisp photos of the moon using this setup right here so I'm using a Tamron 150 to 600 g2 lens with the new tamra 1.4 teleconverter to effectively give me a focal length of 850 millimeters my goal is to get a large picture of the moon so I decided to use a Nikon d70 200 crop sensor to pull me in even closer to the moon instead of using a full-frame sensor and then cropping afterwards I noticed it wasn't as sharp when I cropped in with my d800 so instead I used the aps-c sensor which added another 1.5 magnification to my 850 millimeter focal length so it's like having a 1275 millimeter lens now before I talk about my camera settings I want to share with you some important tips to ensure you get the sharpest image possible first we Dowe need a tripod with a camera bag or by some other means when dealing with super and extreme telephoto pictures the slightest amount of wind can affect your photos so by adding weight you'll help prevent unwanted shakiness secondly if you're pushing a shutter button with your finger you're most likely causing unwanted vibrations try using the shutter release cable or timer mode in some cases the mirror slap and your DSLR may cause shake you might want to use mirror lock-up mode to stop that from happening lastly I recommend using a fast shutter speed even if you're on a tripod subtle vibrations that extreme telephoto focal lengths are very noticeable so you want to mitigate that from happening a good starting point is to make your shutter speed equal to your focal length for example if you're shooting with a 600 millimeter lens make your shutter speed one six hundredth of a second then find your optimal aperture for the sharpest image possible if your ISO is too high and noisy then lower your shutter speed a little bit as long as it's still maintained sharpness I'm going to show you an easy way to reduce that noise later on in this video okay so here I have 15 photos of the moon 14 of them are all photos and the 15 photo is a stack of those 14 rows which I'm going to show you how to do that in a moment but first I just want to talk about my camera settings as you see here my focal length was 850 millimeters with the lens and teleconverter combined and does not take an account that I use the crop sensor so really puts me at over 1,200 millimeters I originally took my test shots at a higher ISO and a shutter speed of one one thousandth of a second to determine the sharpest f-stop for my lens which happened to be f11 f-14 was pretty similar but f11 was a hair sharper and allowed me to take in more light anything over f-14 was considerably softer and same thing it is under f11 it was not sharp the next thing I want to do was lower my shutter speed a little bit so I could lower the ISO I settled that one 807 died playing on cropping in on the final image and my ISO was at 640 which is pretty clean on the Nikon d70 200 now some people might be satisfied with this result however I want to crop in tighter so I wanted a little of noise as possible and noise reduction software will smooth it out but I will lose sharpness so I decided my best option was a stack of photos which helped me to achieve the results that I wanted I took 14 consecutive photos using my camera's built-in intervalometer I took one photo every two seconds and you might be asking why two seconds well I noticed that the mirror slap was causing some vibrations at that focal line so two seconds gave my camera enough time to recover from the vibrations now let's get into this stacking aspect of this okay guys so I'm going to select my 14 photos and I'm not going to do any edits other than getting rid of the chromatic aberration next we want to go to photo edit in open as layers in Photoshop okay so once you have your moon images in Photoshop let's zoom in a little bit we need to align them since we're dealing with the movement of the earth and the movement of the moon as we see here so select all your photos and then what we want to do is go to edit Auto align layers and then hit OK all right so you could check them and they look pretty good as I click this I to turn it off and on they seem pretty lined up don't worry about the blank space around the edge where you can just crop that out later now that the moon pictures are all lined up we want to convert them to a smart object by going to layer smart objects convert to smart object okay so now we have our smart object and what we need to do is reduce some noise and by doing that you're going to go back to layer smart objects and go to stack mode now you have two options here that will reduce noise mean or median I'm going to choose median the only reason I'm doing this is because I did a test earlier and I noticed that meeting reduce the noise and also maintain just a little bit of sharpness when I pixel piece it but do some tests of your own you might find that one works better than the other some of you might not notice any difference at all so just pick one and this will reduce the noise alright so that's it so now all we have to do is flatten the image and then hit file save and bring it back into Lightroom which I already have the one in Lightroom so I'm just going to close this for now and hit don't save okay so now we're back in Lightroom and these last two images are the images I want to focus on the one all the way to the right is the new stack full of 14 images and this is just one single raw photo so before i zoom in and show you the differences which are subtle because again 640 ISO is pretty low so the results aren't drastic but imagine this was you know a half moon or a quarter moon the less light that this moon is giving off the higher that ISO number is going to be so this technique is definitely going to benefit you as this moon gets darker and darker so let's just do a quick basic edit to this the white balance is good right off the bat I just want to up the contrast a little bit and I'm going to apply the same the same exact setting to both of these images I'm just going to leave everything else the same let's go to sharpening this up to sixty and that's all I'm going to do for now I might mess around with with clarity but for this tutorial let's just see what we got here okay guys so at 1 1 you can't really see too much of a difference the one on the right to me looks a little sharper and if we zoom in we can see yeah it's definitely sharper and cleaner with less noise let me scroll down this is what I really wanted to capture these creators and look how beautiful that is as you see the one on the right that we stacked really sharp a lot less noise I could crop this photo pretty heavy and sell it relatively large and still maintain clarity and low noise you know I wouldn't be comfortable going to large with this photo on the left it's just you know even at 640 there's noise there so it limits how much I could crop in on this image yeah I'm really pleased how this came out I think you guys should definitely try out stacking and you know for a teleconverter I'm pretty impressed too because they tend to degrade the quality a little bit so I'm pleasantly surprised as the sharpness I was able to get out of this lens combination this is that new g2 you know 150 to 600 Tamron and the new 1.4 teleconverter I'm actually in the process of testing the 2 X converter but I don't think it's going to be as sharp as the 1.4 so yeah what if the shadows are really good yeah everything was awesome so give this technique a try and definitely the first things first make sure you have a good solid focus on the moon or whatever you're shooting that's really far away and then practice stacking because it will take your photography to the next level so I hope this helps guys please like and subscribe and I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Milky Way Mike

Views: 153,323

Keywords: super telephoto, telephoto lens, extreme, noise reduction, reduce, noise, tamron 150-600 g2, 1.4x teleconverter, 2x, tutorial, learn, teach, how to, moon, waxing, waning, quarter, half, full, new, long lens, nikon, d7200, cropped, sensor, aps-c, mike ver sprill, milky way, night sky, satellite, flat earth, craters, tamron, canon, dslr, 4k, real time, video, digital camera, focal length, crop, tips, stacking, photoshop, smart object

Id: XXN8tVSqteI

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 17 2017