[alocky (Andrew lockwood)]

Originally Posted by Atmos

My only criticism of sorts is envy Fantastic shot.

Ha ha - thanks :-)

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Looks great to me Andrew. Great colour saturation and nice detail.

Cheers Paul - it's always hard to know when it's overcooked, but this is a such a spectacular field it's hard to mess it up. I'm finding it more fiddly to get the colour balance right with a DSLR than doing LRGB with a CCD.

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Ripper image Andrew. I really like it. Gorgeous colours and the star field is divine.

As far as ISO6400 goes. Marianne Oleund who is an engineer and knows a lot about Nikon cameras said there was no gain from going above ISO1600 as its digital gain after that not native ISO. So theoretically that means you would get the best efficiency from the sensor imaging at ISO1600 and boosting in post processing rather than ISO6400 which will lower your dynamic range from the sensor. It also reduces well depth. Perhaps the 810a is different but I doubt Nikon would reprogram their analogue to digital converter for an offshoot model. Anyway that is the theory. You'd have to do 2 images one at 6400 and one at 1600 and process each to know for sure.
I did image long exposure at ISO100 for an hour with the D800e and it seemed to protect stars and colours really well versus say much shorter and high ISO.

Greg.

Thanks for that info Greg -I'd settled on 1600 as a compromise with the D800, so I'll do some more experimentation with this one. The relatively low noise of this thing made me greedy!
I sent Alex Cherny a whole pile of flats at different iso numbers so hopefully he'll do the hard work for me and tell me what to use.