Thought I'd give this topic a boot up... I took the gear outside about 11 pm one night last week and took some shots of the milky way / southern cross. Pretty crappy results, but hey you have to start somewhere 😉 I used the 50 mm prime. Shooting away from a 1/3 sized moon, pretty dark sky, 5000 kelvin, 3200 ISO, F2.0 (in daylight on this lens it always results in a sharper exposure than F1.4) manual focus on infinity, and various different exposure time from 2 secs up to about 10 secs, and no filter on lens. Just to see what gives.... Buggered if I know what others reckon about the settings I chose, but I wasnt happy with the results. However as stated earlier, you gotta start somewhere and see what happens. Oddly it seems (to me) the 50 mm lens isnt wide enough, when you compare what the camera captured compared to what you see with your eyes 😉 I dont have a wide angle prime, so might try the 24-70mm zoom on 24mm next time just to compare. I also took a couple of shots over one of the dams that showed the mirror effect of the trees in the water....they almost looked like they had been taken in daylight. Great stuff, for photos taken at 11pm at night ! Any tips, pointers, comments on night photography? I should have mentioned switching off the long exposure noise reduction, and leaving the high ISO noise reduction on std setting.
