Beginners guide to taking your first milky way photograph - 3 settings

 Beginners guide to taking your first milky way photograph – 3

This is the third blog in a series of posts in which I share what I am learning on my ‘learning journey’ towards obtaining a good milky way night time image. In my second year chasing down this aspiration, last year was dabbling and learning lots. This year, I want to ‘nail’ one or two good milky way landscape images. It’s a mission!

If you have just arrived at this page, perhaps go read the first two posts in this series before this one? They sort of follow a logical order.

One of my very first efforts at trying to capture the milky way one night 😕

This blog post series aims to share what I have learned and achieved thus far to help encourage those of you seeking your first milky way image.

Please remember I am still at the very beginning of my learning journey. I am no expert. I claim no expertise, so, as always, a caveat follows.

I am a complete beginner to astronomy and astrophotography; this entire blog is written from that perspective – a chronicle of my learning journey written by a beginner for other beginners. I know very little about anything frankly but therein lies the attraction. If I can do it with my very limited knowledge – then so can you; and probably better, as I am a rather slow learner at the best of times. If I have made any mistakes in my posts, I apologise. Please drop me a comment highlighting the issue and I will correct it immediately.

I will not be going into huge depth about how things work and why we do things the way we do. I’m not dismissing the importance of having a theoretical understanding – its critical – I’m just saying it’s not the focus of these blog posts. My aim, is to just get you out there, obtaining a first milky way image.

 

To help you achieve this, I will outline some simple answers to these questions:

1.            What equipment do we need?

2.            What advanced planning is needed to ensure success on the night?

3.            What base settings can we use to help us get success?

4.            What foreground composition considerations do we need to make?

5.            What are the different techniques for getting a milky way photograph?

6.            What do we need to consider if we want to do a milky way selfie shot?

7.            How can we improve our milky way photography skills?

8.            What is a ‘beginner’ workflow for post editing our milky way photographs? 

 

A later effort of just the Milky Way in the sky

Post editing is one of my areas for further development this year - I am capturing data but not making a good job of post editing it 

1.       What base settings can we use to help us get success?

In this post I am talking about two different sets of settings – those you need to set within your camera menu; and those base astro exposure settings which will get you a single milky way image on the night, all being well. Remember, I am not getting into the ‘why?’ – just the what! My camera is a Canon, so much of this below applies to this brand but other camera brands will have similar settings in their menus.

Before we jump into it all, I am assuming you have a little understanding about

·        ‘shooting in manual mode’ and also

·        the ‘Exposure triangle – shutter speed, aperture and ISO interactions’.

·        how ‘aperture affects depth of field’ and

·        reading a histogram and understanding what it tells you at a basic level

You can find out more about these things here:

Exposure triangle - https://photographylife.com/what-is-exposure-triangle  and https://capturetheatlas.com/exposure-triangle-explained-photography/

Depth of field - https://photographylife.com/what-is-depth-of-field and https://www.photopills.com/articles/depth-of-field-guide

Reading a histogram - https://capturetheatlas.com/how-to-read-a-histogram-in-photography/  and https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/tutorials/cheat-sheet-how-to-read-a-histogram

 

So, let us now jump into camera menu settings.

 

Firstly, shoot in RAW – it gets the highest quality image and enables most flexible post shot editing. Set your bit-rate to its highest setting if your camera allows that. RAW allows you to bring out detail from the shadows; remove noise in an image; change the WB in editing software. Don’t shoot in JPEG’s!

Secondly – always shoot in Manual mode.

White balance can affect your camera’s histogram, so it is important to set it correctly. I leave mine on daylight (5500 – 6500K). Some friends of mine use 4000 – 5000K. Others just leave theirs on auto. Don’t worry too much about WB settings as you can change it in most editing software later.

Picture control or Creative style – set to neutral.

Long exposure noise reduction – to stop your camera taking an image and then immediately after a second dark frame image – switch off LENR in your camera settings. You can remove any ‘hot pixels’ (a pixel within one of the colour ranges is at its maximum value and so it shows up as a very colourful bright spot in your image).

High ISO Noise Reduction – turn it off to get a better representation of images taken on your rear screen.

Virtual horizon – I use this in my live view screen to ensure I have a level horizon

Turn off auto focus – I focus all my lenses in manual focus mode. In that way when I touch live view rear LCD screen I don’t suddenly alter the focus in my shots. I’ll cover focusing in the dark later in this post.

Turn down LCD screen brightness – you took care to get your eyes dark adapted – be a pity to constantly lose it every time you look at your LCD screen! Turn it up to preview an image, (although it won’t give a realistic representation of your camera exposure setting in the image) or to focus on the stars at infinity when you first start your session. 

Lens stabilisation (lens image stabilisation) – I switch mine off.

Stop light leakage – did you ever find a funny little oblong rubber thing attached to your camera strap when you first got your camera new? Its to slip over your viewfinder to block any light from leaking into the system other than through the lens. I use one, it was a tip someone gave me. Failing that, use some dark duct or masking tape to block off the viewfinder.

 

Wembury Beach looking across to The Great Mewstone Island

Another 'early on' milky way image

Having looked at what camera settings you need to work with, let us now dive into the base astro exposure settings for getting your first milky way image.

Base astro exposure settings

When I watched videos, did some on-line courses, and read various books – I quickly arrived at one conclusion – nobody has a definitive answer to the best starting settings to use. There is some commonality in discussing ‘ranges’ of settings however.

Now, I also need to introduce another concept or two at this point.

Where Milky Way images are concerned – you can do ‘single’ sky/landscape image exposures.  A one off image.  Then there are multi-exposure techniques – so stacking, tracking, focus stacking and more. These multiple exposure techniques I will deal with in a later post in the series. For now, lets just focus on getting a single exposure image – nothing complicated.

(However, at this juncture, I should point out that single image exposures, are in my limited experience view, best for silhouette compositions – e.g. dark rocky outcrop on horizon against backdrop of bright milky way sky; or something similar. If you want to print off at small print size or present in social media, then fine. If you are looking to do high quality large printing, less so!

I have become an advocate of ‘take two images’ milky way photography' – you do one image exposed for the sky and the milky way; another for the foreground. You then blend both images in a photo editing programme after doing basic adjustments to each image.

Why? Because when you look at any of my single exposure images, the foreground always looks really dark and lacking in detail; very noisy and generally out of focus as well)

For now, let’s not get too caught up in the ‘one or two image blend’ debate, only because I am still struggling to internalise what I am learning, if I am frankly honest!

Below are the ‘starting’ settings I have been using over the last year or so to get a single exposure image of a milky way landscape. These settings are mainly about getting the sky right.

·        Format – RAW and camera in manual mode setting

·        Shutter speed – 12 to 30”

·        Aperture – F/1.4 to F/3.5 (On my lenses I favour F/2.8) and focal length 14 - 35mm (I prefer 14mm and 22mm)

·        ISO – 800 – 6400 (Again, on my camera, 800/1600 seems to be the sweet spot for me) 

·        WB – daylight

·        Manual Focus with Lens image stabilisation – off. Focused to infinity 

Some of these setting choices do need a little further qualification however! What if your image in ‘review’ appears too bright, too noisy, under exposed, washed out, trailing stars or ‘pixel cropping’ in the histogram shadows? How do you make corrections to gain improvements on the next image?

Shutter speed – 30” maximum to avoid star trailing! We are aiming for milky way detail and pinpoint sharp stars in the sky. By getting the maximum amount of light we can - the brighter the image will be, the more detail there will be in the shadow areas and less visible noise will be apparent in the image.

So, how can we work out an appropriate shutter speed for our image?  There is the 500 rule for full frame cameras; the 300 rule for crop sensor cameras like mine; and even a NPF rule. I will focus on the 300 rule only because I use it with my crop sensor DSLR. I found the NPF rule gave me very under exposed images.

Essentially these rules work out your maximum shutter speed you can use before experiencing star trailing. I won’t get into the ‘how and why’ they work as such but here is the table I use as quick reference to decide what shutter speed to use when setting up a shot:

 

Focal length of my lenses in mm	Crop sensor 300 rule
10mm	30”
14mm	21”
22mm	14”
35mm	9”
50mm	6”
55mm	5”
135mm	2”

 

You can find a ‘Spot Stars’ setting in the PhotoPills app which will allow you to enter your camera and lens combo along with aperture details etc. It will then do the calculations for you for the 500 and NPF rule.

Aperture F- stop – to gather as much light as we can in our night image – shoot at a maximum aperture and the lowest F-stop. It depends on your lens quality though. I have lenses that I can shoot at F/1.4 or F/2.8 as the widest aperture/lowest F-stop. Basically, the lower the F stop, the wider the lens aperture opening and the more light hitting the sensor. Do some test shots with your lenses and then zoom into the stars on your LCD screen review image. I find at F/1.4, in the corners of the image, my stars are elongated, trailing, bloated. Aberrations!  If I shoot on all my lenses at F/2.8, I find these become minimal and acceptable. Things to remember though regarding aperture – a low F-stop brings a brighter exposure and less visible noise; but a shallow depth of field and increased risk of aberrations. Do some test shots to find what the best aperture is for your lens – how do sharpness and aberrations change across the resulting image? What can you personally accept in an image?

ISO – It took me ages to grasp this but there is an order of adjustments to get a good image. You set aperture first, followed by shutter speed. Last of all you set ISO! Aperture and shutter speed control how much light comes to the sensor, the latter limited by the star trailing limit; ISO determines how much to amplify that light signal and this is the last thing you adjust to affect image brightness.  In a dark sky site on a moonless night, I use 1600 – 6400; normally using 1600/3200 most nights.  Anything higher and I start to introduce lots of ‘noise’ into the image. If you are in a light polluted area or it’s a bright moon, lower the ISO to stop any highlights in the sky or foreground from blowing out.

 

A failed attempt at focus stacking 

OK. The above should help you obtain a single milky way landscape image – camera settings and base astro exposure settings. But, lets cover a couple of other issues that might crop up.

 

Firstly – taking separate sky and foreground shots. What would the base astro exposure settings be for each of these?

I have been experimenting all last year with this. I first cottoned on to shooting two separate images during an excellent free on-line Milky Way course by Kristen Rose. She does them on Facebook and they are brilliant. So many people have been able to go out and shoot their first image because of her advice. Dan Zafra is another whose free courses helped me engage with milky way landscape shooting. Finally, the YouTube channel Nightscapes and some of Peter Zelinka’s videos – both gold mines of information for beginners like you and me. 

So, what do I understand about this approach?

Simply put, you shoot two different shots from precisely the same location but at different times so that they require different exposure settings. You then process the shots individually and finally blend them together.  So, I might shoot my foreground interest element at blue hour and then much later when it’s very dark, my milky way sky shot. I might move up to 10m or so away from my blue hour shooting position so I can get the best view of the sky. I’d perhaps incorporate just a little bit of the landscape horizon in the bottom of the sky image but 90% of it would be sky.

Settings for a foreground shot – I shoot a much longer exposure shutter speed than I can for the sky; I’m not limited by the star trailing issue! My sky part of the image will be overexposed and full of star trails but that doesn’t matter. I will be replacing the sky with another image later in post processing.

What exposure I start with depends on what aperture I am using, how much depth of field I want in the image and how much light is already lighting the foreground area. It’s a trial and error jobbie frankly, trying to decide what shutter speed to use. I want to keep ‘noise’ to the minimum but I want detail to show in the shadowy areas. So, I tend to go for somewhere between 1 – 4 minutes exposures. ISO – if it is very dark – I use 400/1600 and then check the histogram. I don’t want the histogram bunched down the left hand side, clipping to black. It depends whether I am shooting at blue hour, twilight or actually in the dark.

 

Secondly, there is the issue of focusing at night. How do we focus in the dark?

Last year this single issue drove me nuts! So many images not properly focused – especially in the foreground elements. I had to do lots of research and practising to start progressing the quality of my images. I cannot begin to estimate how much time in a session was wasted with me trying to get pin point stars! Just don’t go there!

It is pitch black dark. Your camera lens is in manual focus mode.  You can’t see the foreground properly. Auto-focus is not an option! And there is the hidden elephant in the landscape, so to speak – if you are shooting at wide apertures and focusing at infinity to get the stars – how do you get any depth of field in your foreground landscape elements?

How do I ensure that the sky is in focus and stars are sharp?

1.       Camera and lenses are switched to manual focus mode

2.       I generally try to find my lens infinity focus point during the day – I find a distant horizon, focus on it using auto focus – so that everything on the horizon line is in sharp focus. Take test shots, review and zoom in on review image to check distant objects are in focus. When I get it right, I mark the focus ring on the lens with a wax pencil or tape it with duct tape securely so it won’t move. Later that night, my stars should be in focus! I take test shots and check on zoom in that they are.

3.       However, now I have grown more confident, I tend to do my focusing at night using LIVE-VIEW focusing on the stars themselves. All my lenses are prime lenses, not zooms!

a.        I turn the focus ring to infinity and then set a high ISO – 6400. Aperture is at F/2.8. Shutter speed at 20” as I am normally using my 14mm Samyang lens.

b.       Live-view is switched on. 

c.       Pointing the camera towards a bright star, I use my laser pen resting on my camera to position the camera so that the star will appear in the centre of the grid of thirds on the LCD rear viewer. I turn the focus ring until the star appears sharp and small on the rear screen and make final small adjustments of the camera to get the star into the centre of the LCD rear panel.

d.       My Canon has a digital zoom button which brings up a white rectangle on the screen. I move this into position over the star so that it sits centrally within it. Pressing the zoom button once more brings me to x10 magnification and then I can make minute adjustments in focus until the star is tiny and pinpoint sharp. I then tape my focus ring in that position so it won’t be accidently moved.

e.       I now position my camera for the composition I want to take.

f.        Time for some test shots – is my composition right? Are the stars in focus? Is the foreground main elements in focus? I tend to do settings like 20” at F/2.8 and ISO 6400+. I just want to see that the composition is as I want it. It will be overexposed but I am throwing these test shots away, so no worries.

That is how I take care of the sky element. But!!!

How can we ensure that our landscape foreground details are sharp in an image? 

The above methodology gives you sharp stars and this would be the method for a separate sky image.

An alternative method for a single image exposure is Hyperfocal distance focusing. So far, most of my single exposure milky way images have been based on Live-view methodologies - focused to infinity to get sharper stars and any foreground in focus has been a bonus based on pot-luck!   

Hyperfocal distance methodology gains a maximum depth of field and sharpness throughout the image from back to front.  It is based on a hyperfocal distance point in the landscape – focus on that and everything in the image from infinity to half the hyperfocal distance will be in focus and reasonably sharp. Now here is an important point – if you don’t get the hyperfocal point correctly identified in your landscape and you fall short of it, any stars in the background will lose their sharpness – which seems to defeat the purpose of a good milky way sky image! Focus at the correct point and most of the landscape remains sharp along with the stars in the sky.

PhotoPills is your friend! It has hyperfocal distance tables – it does the hard work calculations for you. I enter my camera and then look up the focal length of my lens and the aperture I am shooting at. So, at 14mm and an aperture of F/2.8 for my Canon 800 D – the hyperfocal distance would be 3.73m. All I have to do is estimate where 4m is is in front of my tripod. If I focus on that point – everything from there to infinity should be sharp. Anything in the foreground within 4m wont be!

I hope I have explained this correctly. I’ve yet to try this hyperfocal distance method at night – I’ll let you know how I get on! Meanwhile, if I haven’t made it clear – here are some tutorials: https://photographylife.com/hyperfocal-distance-explained and https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutions/calculating-hyperfocal-distance-in-photography  and https://www.photopills.com/calculators/hyperfocal-table

On a night when I managed to get meteors, part of the milky way and part of an aurora all in one shot

Sadly, it was out of focus practically from front to infinity.

It is a tough learning curve is this Milky Way imaging malarkey! 

Focus Stacking is another possible method for getting all your landscape elements focused. especially if you are trying to fit in flowers at the very edge of your foreground front! (Although, I found that the wind kept blowing them and so they kept appearing fuzzy!) 

We use wide angle lenses with wide apertures for night time photography and given we are focusing on the stars and milky way, then much of our foreground will be out of focus. Focus stacking involves taking a number of exposures of the scene but you change the focus point within the foreground between each shot. (With little experience to date - I found focus stacking difficult to do in the dark - I needed to use my head torch to try and find the 'blur' point (see below) and wasn't very successful in doing so. I found focus stacking at blue hour was easier - but that is just me. I have yet to master this technique but I have tried it a couple of times last year. It sounded simple, yet in my reality......well never mind. I have this unique ability to overcomplicate the simple! )

Later in post editing, we then blend all the shots into one final image exposure which should be pretty sharp from back to front.  

Having decided on your exposure settings - aperture, shutter speed and ISO (our base astro settings) -you focus at infinity - i.e. the milky way sky and take your first shot.  I then review the image on my LCD screen and I zoom right in. I am looking for the point in the foreground where the focus is starting to become blurry. At that point - I try to find an object I can focus on and I now change my focus to settle on that object at that point of blurriness - Live-view and my digital zoom button help. When focused on that point I take another shot. I repeat these steps until I have focused on the closest part of the foreground to me. That is my last re-focusing point. I should now have enough shots of the foreground from back to front where all parts of the landscape are in focus; as well as the night sky at infinity. 

Now to be fair, I have a friend who does it in reverse - starts at the foreground and works to the back and infinity point. No idea which is the better method - up to individual choice I guess. 

I found this blog post simple to understand and quite informative on focus stacking: 

https://intothenightphoto.blogspot.com/2023/06/focus-stacking-nightscapes-with.html

Just in case you think I am making no progress at all - here are two images from towards the end of last year which show, albeit slowly, I am making some progress! 

I found these videos helpful when trying to get my head around focus stacking: 

At the end of this lengthy post, I hope I have helped you get a good idea about the following:

1.       The camera settings you need to set in your camera menus

2.       The basic astro exposure settings for getting sharp stars and focused milky way in the sky

3.       Getting the sky in focus

4.       Getting any landscape foreground elements in focus

 

In my next post in the series, I will consider issues to do with composition - What foreground composition considerations do we need to make?

As always, if I have anything above wrong, drop me a comment and I will correct it immediately.

In the meantime, clear skies, stay safe, good astro image hunting.

Steve

It seemed like a good foreground subject at the time

However, a combination of random SUV headlights, scattered cloud, random lodge room lights and intense cold.......all excuses .......but I bundled it! Ho Hum! 

This was bad editing of two shots - the sky and a separate foreground. Both poorly exposed and then horrendous post editing blending! 

Don't be put off by my poor images - getting a good milky way image is far simpler than my exemplars would suggest. Remember, I am starting form a low base level. Having never used a DSLR before - I decided to go from auto to manual; and then take on deep space astrophotography and landscape night astrophotography all at the same time as I tried to start using a photo editing program like Affinity Photo for the first time. Throw in trying to understand deepskystacker, SIRIL, GraXpert and Sequator.....no wonder I get so confused! 

Clear skies, stay safe, have fun out there and as always drop me a comment - show us your first milky way images; correct anything I have wrong above

Take care now 

Steve