I'm very keen to do some nightscaping and get into photography a bit more.
I have a Canon 400D, with just the stock 18-55mm lens.
I'd love to get a wide angle lens, but at the same time don't have a ton of money to spend. I'm also unsure of what features or size I should be looking for. Would something like a 24mm be good or not?
I don't mind if it's old or doesn't have auto focus or things like that. Weight is also not an issue.
Any help in pointing out where and what I should buy, would be awesome.
It is not as wide as you probably want but you can't go past the Canon f1.8 50mm lens for about 130 dollars. A great little lens also known as a nifty fifty .
The Canon 10-22 or the Sigma 10-20 will give you 16mm equivalent, good for those big sky landscapes, big foreground landscapes and huge milky way skies at night. 24 is no good on your crop body.
Thanks guys, there's a few to look at here. Just in regards to the 50mm lens (I know it's not exactly what I'm after in this instance), but would this be better than my current lens just because of the bigger aperture it can achieve or is it better still as it's at a fixed zoom?
The sigma 10-20 looks like it might be in my price range if I can find a second hand one somewhere. This will fit onto my canon will it?
Sigma available in most popular mounts including Canon.
Crank up the ISO and use the widest lens you have at its maximum aperture. That 50mm is a mild telephoto on your APS-C body, good for portraits, not so good for a big sky.
50mm is too narrow for nightscapes unless you use a tracking device and even then its really too narrow. 50mm becomes 75mm on a crop sensor (APSc sized).
14 to 24mm on a full frame gives good results. So that would be 9 to 16mm.
Tokina gets a good rap. I would check out images others have taken with it. As I recall though it seemed to give bad coma in the corners. I may have that wrong though.
With terrestial imaging chromatic aberration is often regarded as not that important as it can be corrected usually with the supplied Canon/Nikon software. But in nightscapes it does stand out more and you'll get purple stars. Again this is correctable in software but I would put that and lack of distortion/coma as the main qualities of the lens.
I also would not get anything slower than F2.8. Most lenses improve in performance when stopped down. Often around F5.6 to F7.1 they peak in performance. However you really want to image at about F2.2 to F2.8.
You can go longer but then you need to track the camera on a mount of some sort like the popular Vixen Polarie.
Here's some settings I use on my Nikon and it would be very similar on your Canon except I would advise a lower ISO than the latest generation of Canon and Nikon cameras (and other brands).
1. ISO 6400 (I would recommend ISO1600 to 3200 for your 650D).
2. 14mm at F2.8.
3. Autofocus turned off on camera and lens. Focus in live view. Point to a bright star, make sure your camer's ISO is at max, focus and change F ratio until its sharp and chromatic aberration is contained. Tape the focus right with some tape to lock it down so you don't bump focus handling the camera. Take a test shot to check and magnify the image on the LCD to check the stars. In winter I wrap a bit of insulation around my Nikon 14-24mm lens when doing time lapses. It holds off dew. You can also get chemical heating pads from the chemist that are sticky. Stick on of those on first, then the insulation and I use a rubber band to hold it on to prevent dew on a cold night. Make sure lens is focused and locked down with tape before you do this.
4. Camera in manual mode.
5. Image set to RAW.
6. White balance set to around 4200K. This varies with different camera brands. With Fuji and Sony auto white balance seems to work better. Sometimes I knock down magenta and green one tick on my Nikon. Not always though.
7. Picture style to vivid (whatever the eqivalent is on a Canon).
8. Long exposure noise reduction on.
9. Noise reduction off (you may need to experiment with this as your 650D is slightly noisy and it may be better to have this on).
10. Lens correction, lens vignetting correction on if its an option on your camera.
11. 30 seconds.
Level your camera (some cameras have a built in plane type level these days which is handy or get one of those green plastic level cubes that fit on your camera's hotshoe).
Use a tripod. A ballhead mount is handy. I got this great carbon fibre tripod off ebay complete with ballhead mount for $228. Its light, it works very well, has a high payload capacity, a carry bag and is very high quality. If it were a Manfrotto or Gitzo it would've cost 3 to 4 times for the same or less. I can also adjust the ballhead with one hand which is great at night.
Take a few test shots and refine the above if necessary for your camera.
Find a nice scenic spot and frame and compose your image. A nice foreground, a dead tree or nice tree, a lake, the ocean etc.
You can make panorama's as well. I use PT Gui Pro.
Process in your camera's software and fine tune white balance, noise reduction, lens correction, exposure, contrast, vibrance, saturation then save as a setting. Next time chances are you can use the same setting.
Lenses:
Nikon 14-24mm F2.8 ED is considered king of this arena. Probably not for much longer. But its expensive, heavy and a large bulbous front element. Fuji makes a fabulous 14mm 2.8 APS lens. No distortion, no chromatic aberration, a manual focus ring that locks, its light, its less than half the price of the Nikon and just as good if not a tad better than the Nikon (less field curvature). $865.
Zeiss is bringing out a 12mm F2.8 soon for mirrorless. An adapter could be gotten to convert to Canon. No doubt it will be spectacular.
Samyang lenses are exceptional value and sharp. Be prepared to send one back for a replacement until you get a good one though.
Voigtlander makes a very nice 15mm but its F5.6 so no good for us.
I would personally go with the Samyang 14mm F2.8. Its proven, there are many superb images here with it. It suffers from complex distortion called moustache distortion but I have never noticed it in nightscape images. So nothing to worry about. The Tkina may be good but I would check out its performance in the corners first. Distorted streaky stars in the corners spoils an image.
Samyang makes a cheap F2.8 fisheye as well. I have one for my Sony Nex 6 and it works great for nightscapes. Except of course you have fisheye distortion. There is software that can undistort it. I have't tried them out yet. But its a nice effect that probably wears off fast!
When chosing focal length and exposure follow this rule. 600 divided by the focal length gives you the maximum exposure before star trailing becomes noticeable without tracking. So a 50mm gives a max exposure of 8 seconds whereas a 14mm gives a max exposure of 28 secs on an APS sized camera sensor.
I think you'll find mirrorless cameras like Fuji XE1 and Sony Nex 5R and 6 outperform your Canon 650 in terms of noise by quite a bit. They have the latest Sony Exmor sensors which are ahead of anyone else at the moment.
Canon 6D, Nikon D600 would be the nightscape camera of choice at the moment or Canon 5D3 and Nikon D800E. Fuji XE1, Sony nex 5r and 6, Olympus OMD EM5, Pentax K5 models are all good in low light. There are more coming on the market all the time. I suspect the new Nikon Coolpix A would be good as well. There's a new Panasonic Lumix that may also be good. It can be argued that mirrorless cameras are offering the same or better than APS DSLRs except for fast moving objects autofocus in a much lighter, smaller body with a terrific range of lenses.
Greg.
Last edited by gregbradley; 20-04-2013 at 10:25 AM.
He has a 400D. I would avoid going past ISO-800 for relatively noise-free images. If you're not doing time lapse, enable in camera noise reduction and high ISO noise reduction.
As for lens, you'd want something in the 10-22 range to give the equivalent field of view as the full frame cameras. Canon has a 10-22, and Tokina makes a good 11-16. Being a Canon zealot, I avoid third party lenses myself, but, that's just my personal preference.
Also, if shooting RAW, why would you set a picture style? Leave it at standard and set it in post to your liking.
Oh yes sorry a 400D. I have a 40D and whilst its a great camera its now quite dated in its high ISO performance so yes ISO800-1600 would max it out. Nex 6 and XE1 perform much better and will handle ISO3200 and even ISO6400 as they are latest gen sensors.
You'd be better off then getting a Polarie and do 120 exposures at ISO800 and that way lens choice is far less critical. You'd be better off with a cheaper lens and the Polarie. You'd end up with better images.
Nightscapes in my opinion are not that sensitive to the lens apart from wide and fast. Look at H's recent 50mm shot on a Polarie. Not the best lens but what a great result. Almost any lens is good stopped down. You really pay the extra for the lenses that perform well wide open. Cheap lenses tend not to. So go long exposure and stop it down and use your 400D and ISO800-1600 with long exposure noise reduction but no noise reduction (too plastic looking images).
Why chose a picture style? Less post processing. You end chosing one or the other in post processing. You are not locked in when shooting RAW but it saves time later. I like to have the ooc output just about perfect so there is less need for post processing. But that's just how I like to do things. No rule about it.
I believe Canon are working on a 14-24mm F2.8. No doubt it will be a cracker as it has to at least meet the Nikon 14-24 which has now been around for several years. Nikon and Canon tend to leapfrog each other.
I went through a very similar thought process in the last couple of months. I had only one lens for my Canon 30D, a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8. After buying a Polarie I decided to sell the Tamron and buy a few cheap manual prime lenses on ebay.
So I ended up with three old lenses: 28mm f/2.8, 55mm f/2 and a 135mm f/3.5. I tried them all out at IISAC last week and can share my experience:
Only one of the lenses is a keeper (the Asahi 55mm f/2). The others aren't sharp enough for star fields and are now back on ebay.
Even the 28mm isn't wide enough for nightscapes, since it's equivalent to around 45mm on Canon APS-C cameras like ours. In hindsight, perhaps I should have kept the Tamron 17-50mm.
So it might be worth trying out your existing lens for nightscapes if you haven't already done so. You might not need a new lens at all!
BTW, I tried out a Sigma 10-20mm lens a couple of years ago. Even in daytime shots I found the edge distortion unacceptable. Reckon it would be pretty bad with stars. If I was going for an ultra-wide now it would probably be the Tokina 11-16mm since I've seen such good results from it.
Thanks for the replies everyone. A lot of info to take in there, and all very useful, so thanks
Thanks for sharing your experiences there Morton, I'll steer clear of the ones that were no good. I think I'll need to convince the mrs to let me spend a bit more right off the bat
If you go with Sigma the local importer has a policy to price match the grey sellers. Recently picked up a Sigma 17-50 2.8 OS and after a phone call to the importer walked out with a local warranty and $250 better off
I was in the same boat last year with my 450d. I picked up the Sigma F1.4 50mm and later the Tokina 11-16mm. The Tokina is a nice lens and works well wide open for nightscapes. For daytime shooting I stop it down to F6 or more to get depth of frame. The Sigma has a bit of chromatic aberration when wide open but is quite sharp and has lots of aperture.
Here are some 1200x800 crops (no other processing) from a Tokina 11-16mm @11mm, 6 sec, f/4, ISO1600, Sony a77, no tracking. The full frame is 6000x4000. This was the only clearish bit of sky with the 92% moon out of frame to the top left. Bottom left would be my roof.
