Photographing Star Trails/Milky Way Galaxy - by Kevin McElheran (ISpy)

[Bytephoto]

- THE DAWN OF NIGHT –
Photographing Star Trails/Milky Way Galaxy
Written by Kevin McElheran

www.poetryofmotion.com

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Few things capture ones imagination and wonder like a clear moonless night sky. With all its grandeur, beauty and incredible vastness, learning how to photograph it properly will amaze all who view the photos. This article is written for not only those who have never tried this type of photography and may be intimidated by the process but also for anyone who just loves to be out under the enormity of the night sky with camera in hand.

My first experience trying this type of photography occurred about three years ago when I was finding myself needing to be challenged with new types of photography and night photography was high on this list of ‘to do’s’.
I was going all out on this new photographic concept (for me) and was not going to settle on just setting up in the back yard…no, it had to be a location just a short 2 hours drive away and in the middle of the night amongst the bears and wolves in the Banff National Park of the Canadian Rockies. With not a clue of what I was doing I grabbed my camera gear in one hand and with the other I browsed the internet looking for “how to photograph the Milky Way”.

Surfing the information highway I thought was going to be 10 minutes to find, read and jot down some notes instead turned into 2 hours of grueling frustration as no article written on the subject addressed all I needed to know, specifically, what camera settings is required.

It is my intention and hope to make this process as painless as possible leaving no questions unanswered. You will be able to read this article, take some notes and head out to some exotic location, set up and take your own amazing photos of the Milky Way Galaxy or make your own star trail photographs.

My first shot of star trails was done with the Canon 20d, with the 17 – 85mm 4 – 5.6 lens.



© Kevin McElheran
Dorothy Catholic Church, Alberta, Canada



© Kevin McElheran
Dorothy Catholic Church, Alberta, Canada
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In my night photography workshop, I instruct my students prior to going out that what is required for the best images of the Milky Way is use a fast, wide angle 2.8 lens. If your going to take the time of several hours out in the field and spend your money to either have someone teach you or use up your gas driving to location then be prepared with the best equipment you can get your hands on. There are several camera stores in each city that rent this equipment for very reasonable rates. For instance, The Camera Store in Calgary, Alberta, Canada will rent you a 15mm 2.8 fisheye lens for $25/weekday or just $25 for the whole weekend! That’s nothing if you consider buying one for around $800!

Now that you have your lens and a digital dslr, you need a good tripod with a remote cable. If you don’t have a cable then your down to using the timer on your camera which eats up valuable battery life.

As far as settings on the camera go, lets talk briefly on aperture and ISO’s. Having these two set properly will be the difference between the stars either showing dim or nice and bright when looking at your images later, on your monitor.

Set the aperture of your lens to it widest point either at 2.8 or at 3.5/4 for most other lenses. That will allow the most light possible to enter the lens and onto the sensor. Now with regard to ISO’s, there is much opinion on what setting is best and again what your wanting to do is bring out the “highlights” being the stars by boosting the ISO levels.

If your dealing with amateur bodies such as the Canon 20/30/40/50d line or the Nikon d40/90 etc…then I have found ISO 1600 is the max you will want to use.

If your using pro bodies such as the Canon 5d Mark II or the Nikon d700 etc, then pushing the ISO’s even further up to 4000 is recommended. There are two lines of thought here when photographing stars, the first thought is shoot with ISO’s no higher than 800 as noise is too much an issue to deal with so shoot low enough not to cause a noise problem and the second is shoot high ISO’s and clean the noise up with a anti-noise program like Noise Ninja or Noiseware Pro later at home on your computer.

The question I would ask when faced with these two thoughts is “do I want lots of stars to show in my shot or not”? If you use low ISO’s then you’ve just eliminated all the dim level stars and have turned down the brightest stars to ones you can barely see and what is the point in that?


© Kevin McElheran
Burmis Tree, Crowsnest Pass in Southern Alberta, Canada
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Moving on to the next setting. Shoot in RAW. When processing later in Camera RAW/Photoshop or other, your final image will need all the pixel information it can get for the best quality.

Also, most dslr’s have a long exposure noise removal program ‘in-camera’, go to it and turn it off. The reason for this is that it eats up too much battery life. For every second the shutter is open for the shot, the noise program will require another second to process out the noise. So if your out in the middle of nowhere with your one battery and your shot is going to be 40 minutes long (for star trails) then your camera will not be able to take another shot for another 40 minutes while it’s processing. So now you’ve just eaten up 80 minutes of life out of your battery and it’s pretty much done and so are you cause it’s now 1am and you can’t keep your eyes open. Cross your fingers and hope the 4 hour drive to and from location was worth the one shot you managed to do!

So now that we have figured out:

• Aperture – WIDE OPEN
• ISO’s – HIGH 1600 Amateur Bodies, up to 4000 Pro Bodies
• Shooting RAW
• Shut ‘in-camera’ noise mode OFF

What’s next is how long should you have your shutter open for. The answer to that is a maximum of 30 seconds for sharp Milky Way shots. If your wanting to show nice long star trails then there are two ways of doing this.

(1) Lock your remote cable on and set your camera to burst mode and just fill up your memory card with 30 second shots.

• When you get home put all those images in a folder on your computer.

• Open up Photoshop cs3/4 – FILE>SCRIPTS>LOAD FILES INTO STACK>

• Click down arrow and choose folder>BROWSE>find the folder and click ok.

• Photoshop will then take all those images, lets say you have 100, and will make 100 layers.
• At the top right, click the layers tab to view all 100 layers in a list.

• Click on the first layer then click on the down arrow just above that and choose “lighten”.

• Then click on the second layer, click down arrow, choose “lighten” and do that for every single layer.

As you go along, you will notice your star trail forming at 30 seconds each time.
If for some reason, lets say 20 minutes into your shot a car with it’s headlights on drives up and wrecks your shot, don’t worry!! You will see that shot when you click on the layer that that occurred. All you do is pass over that layer or delete it and go onto the next! It’s that simple.

(2) The other option is to take one looooooooong shot. Lets say your going to make it 40 minutes long and that CAR drives up 20 minutes into the shot. You're DONE. Shot IS WRECKED and battery is well used up. I would recommend trying #1 above and be safe than sorry.

© Kevin McElheran
McDougall Memorial United Church in Morley, Alberta, Canada
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© Kevin McElheran
Grain Elevator, Dorothy, Alberta, Canada
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That’s about it. From here on in the only thing to worry about is composition. Framing your Milky Way shot with a foreground subject to make it interesting. Shine it up with a flashlight and just have fun with it.

I do hope you found this informative and that if you haven’t tried this type of photography that you will feel confident enough to try it out!

Kevin McElheran
www.poetryofmotion.com

We want to thank Kevin for contributing the first article to

Bytephoto's new "Inspirational Photography Forum"

[dbchris]

Thank you Kevin & Byte for bringing this wonderful article to us!

I have done start trails over the years, but never with as stunning success as these. I will be out staying up late again! Think I will wait for warmer weather though.

Beth

[buddy4344]

Great article. I love sky shots. I have written twice on my blog on shooting the sky (both trails and milky way shots) My articles are at these links:

http://www.chobesafari.com/photograp...ur-safari.html

and also

http://www.chobesafari.com/photograp...-at-night.html

While proud of my writing, Kevin's may be one of the best 'all in one' summaries I have read. I stack my images of star trails with a free download stacking software called Startrails Ver 1.1. A link to the download is: http://www.startrails.de/

Well done.

BTW, I just added a link to this page at both articles noted above. Also, as a side note, I plan to post a star trail shot I took last week at the Jersey Shore on Friday, so this tutorial is a timely reference I can add when I post that shot. ... and as an added post script, the topic for that shot was the excellent pier shot by our own Beth (dbchris ) in one of January's weekly contests( http://www.bytephoto.com/photopost/s...sun-up&cat=500 ).

[punwit]

So, long lost twin, very nicely composed article. The information is clear and concise and you don't tend to be overly verbose like your LLT does.

Darren

[smcevoy]

Great article Kevin - and everything you've shot is a short distances from me! Gotta get out at night - one of these days!

[ispy]

It was my hope to write this article so that the process could be read with ease (and to because my twin brother needed the extra help).

It's never the wrong time of year to get out there and experiment. The shot included here was my very first and as I mentioned I was googling "how to photograph" star trails in my article, it was -35c outside and for some strange reason that night was the night to try my luck. I went outside, started the car and scraped the ice off the windshield and ran inside to see what information I could find on the subject thinking it would only take 10 minutes. I think it was 30 minutes later I remembered the car was still running so I went outside to turn it off. 1 1/2 hours later, still confused with the reading, I took off for Banff.

I was very frustrated because one article would say use low ISO settings and others would say use high settings. I remember driving thinking this was going to be a trial and error session as I still didn't know what size image I should be shooting in (RAW or jpeg), large/med/or small jpgs??? It was like these other photographers would write lengthy articles on the subject but not answer the questions I had running around in my mind.

Even though I had a large degree of uncertainty as to what I was doing, I'm glad I went anyway. I learned so much in my first attempt that I was able to work out my questions and I think it was a week or so later that my next outing was 2.5 hours away. It was so important to shoot these two locations as I learned the difference between shooting one long exposure versus multiple stacked images. The third outing was a cake walk as the process was all figured out.

What was crazy funny about being out in Banff for my first attempt was that I had two batteries for my camera. I was confident I had enough juice for two nice loooooooooong exposure shots. So here I am in Banff at midnight down a long dark road and it's -35c and very windy. No one in their right mind would be outside.....well, except me and my wife made sure I understood as I left the house that I CRAZY so I did the drive, got to location, set up the camera to take a 40 minute shot when about 20 minutes in, some other NUT BAR besides me is driving down the road toward me with his HIGH BEAMS ON!! and driving very slowly. I remember thinking many bad thoughts and saying words I'd never write as this person had no good reason to be driving down this back road. By the time the car drove by me at about 1 mile/hour I noticed the people in the car had let their little poodle out for a run and made it run the whole length of the road there and back.


My shot was wrecked so I waited till they were kind enough to let their dog back in the car and drive away to put in my second battery to try again. I did another long exposure shot and drove home arriving back at 3:30am.

Here's the shot!
http://www.bytephoto.com/photopost/s...-night&cat=500




Kevin McElheran

[punwit]

Hey Kev, I'm guessing the debate over ISO settings has to do with noise. High ISO's produce more noise than lower settings but long exposures also produce noise. It would appear that you've found that the long exposure noise is more detrimental than the high ISO noise. I would suggest that folks with full frame sensors and subsequent cleaner high ISO images will definitely see better results by bumping up the ISO setting and shortening the shutter time. I would suspect that it may be a bit of a balancing act for some depending on how their cameras handle higher ISO's. As the resident guru I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts.

[hrow]

Thanks Kevin for a great article. It will be put to good use this summer as shooting the stars is high on my to do list. Unfortunately, eastern Pennsylvania has a huge amount of light pollution and finding a dark sky area is extremely difficult but I'll give it a whirl!

[ispy]

Darren, ISO's and noise is an interesting topic and debated a lot when shooting a variety of subjects and especially when shooting into a vast black sky. For me when I set out to make a crisp 30 second Milky Way shot, that is my purpose, period. For those suggesting that ISO 100, 200, 400 and even 800 are your limits is like a competitive swimmer going to swim a race, checks the water with his foot, gets scared and runs away! That swimmer didn't realize his purpose which was to jump in, get wet and race, and photographers with the equipment lose focus of the purpose when trying to photograph something that is so dim lit to begin with using low ISO's.

Not much focus was spent on noise in my article only that I expressed the ISO limits amateur camera bodies and pro bodies can handle before noise is more destructive than not. There is no need to fuss too much about noise if one has a good removal program like Noiseware Pro/Noise Ninja and the like. But once the noise becomes destructive, no removal program will fix it. If you know what your program is capable of doing then push the ISO limits.

With the 5dMarkII shooting a 30 second shot of the Milky Way, the destructive noise point is at ISO 5000 so turn it down to 4000. With my Canon 20d shooting the same scene, ISO 3200 is the destructive point so try either turning the time down from 30 seconds to 20 or set the ISO to 1600.

With all that said, remember that was for shooting single 30 second shots. If your set on doing that one long exposure then using ISO 100 to 800(max) is what you'll use as you don't want the sensor being hyper sensitive to light for that one long duration. Turning the ISO's down (let's say to 400) should be good for a 30 minute shot but the problem is is that you won't know if your shot is exposed properly until that time is up and if it's a bad shot, your doing it over again, maybe having to readjust the ISO's or the shutter time and guessing again. SO IT'S A WASTE OF TIME DOING THOSE ONE LONG EXPOSURES - Do yourself a gentle, kind favour and stack multiple 30 second shots to make the long star trail shot. You will know right away if your settings will work or not. NO WAITING.

Hrow, our cities our quite spread out so driving an hour or two will get you to some pretty dark areas. Those church shots above are 2.5 hours away and down in a low valley in Alberta's badlands.

Hope this helps!

Kevin

[buddy4344]

For me, the noise is not the biggest issue. In a night sky scene, it's pretty easy to correct. For the star trail, ISO and f-stop both have a large effect on where you are collecting every little star or just the steaks from the brightest stuff in the sky. On the other hand, when capturing the Milky Way, High ISO and a wide open aperture allows a lot of light (i.e. the whole galaxy) to enter the sensor.

[ispy]

Yes, that's right Buddy. High ISO's for a stacked multi image star trail shot can look too busy with a zillion stars. Turning down the ISO's as you mentioned to just show the brightest stars looks the best. Thanks for your input.

[buddy4344]

Coincidentally, Alister Benn just published an article called 'The art of available night light'. It makes an interesting companion read to Kevin's. He covers the broader subject with some complimentary overlap. Definelty worth the read. Here is the link: http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/ind...0-alister-benn