Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris.B
Very nice. Well done.
Music goes perfectly with it .
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Thanks Chris. I am enjoying this new facet of astrohotography.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bobbyf
Fantastic stuff Greg. Your others are fab too 
Can you share some info on the shots please, like lens used, exposure and any batch processing you did etc
Cheers
Bob |
Cheers Bob.
Here's the thing. I did very little!! Yeah! normally astrophotography requires hours and hours of intricate software processing of the images.
This is the beauty of this time lapse function in the Nikon D800E. It is also in some other Nikon models.
Nikon D800E on a tripod. I used a Nikon 14-24mm F2.8ED lens at F2.8.
ISO6400, in camera time lapse function, white balance set to 4200K, no noise reductions at all, picture control set to vivid. Image quality set to jpeg fine. Manual focus - autofocus turned off ( I focused on a passing jet using live view the other night and taped it in place with some duct tape). I have a piece of insulation wrapped around the lens to reduce dewing although the last few nights have been dry. I intend getting some hand warmer pads and put them under the insulation next. Lenses sometimes will dew easily especially in winter. Flicker control is turned on.
The in camera time lapse then is programmed for the gap between shots (I used 10 seconds), the number of hours and it calculated the number of shots. Then it does its thing. If it runs out of battery it turns the resulting exposures into a movie next you turn it on with power again.
If you want to stop it you simply turn power off and next time on it makes the sequence into a movie.
I did no processing of any kind on these sequences - zip, nilch!
The first short sequence was slightly different and was my attempting at handling the transition from day to night. It works but it does not then shoot the night sky hard enough using the metering system. I used auto ISO in aperture mode. I set minimum ISO to 100, maximum to 6400. I defined minimum shutter speed to lowest which was 4 seconds (why did they do that?? The thing goes to 30 seconds and some engineeer decides 4 will be enough!).
I am currently checking out an iphone app called Triggertrap that is running my camera. I think it will be more useful for certain things rather than the transitions from night to day or day to night. At this stage anyway.
I also have an intervalvometer to do these things manually should I want to shoot in RAW which I will try at some point to see if it is worth the extra work in the results I get.
Software was Nikon View NX2 and Nikon Movie editor.
On an earlier time lapse I used Photoshop CS6 and Roland Cakewalk for sound. The Nikon is easier to use but unless you shoot in RAW you don't have any processing available. CS6 was better but I was using a trial only and its expired. Perhaps CS4 will do similar, I'll have to try it out.
I am still learning my way round all of this.
Greg.
