Landscape Astrophotography Tip #2
Don’t sweat the small stuff when it comes to landscape astrophotography!
One of the quickest ways to progress on your journey in this difficult discipline is to let go of the perfectionist mindset as early as you can. Perfectionism will not only slow you down unnecessarily but also potentially cost you a small fortune. That’s not say that perfectionist approaches don’t work. If you’re happy getting 1-2 perfect shots per season then by all means ignore what I say below. But if you want to get maybe 30-50 really nice images per season then read on. Oh, and bear in mind that i’m influenced by living in Scotland, where you might only get a couple of nights a year where it is crystal clear, windless, temperate, and moonless.
Here are some pointers:
Any wide angle lens with an aperture of f/2.8 or larger will do. The gains from f/1.4 primes that cost thousands of pounds is miniscule.
Unless you are going to print the images at A1 / A2 sizes, small imperfections will not be noticeable unless you peep at pixel level.
Focus on working fairly quickly and getting as many compositions as you can out of the night, rather than going to excruciatingly difficult lengths to get a single image - it often fails to be perfect anyway.
Techniques such as tracking and stacking really only come into their own with deep sky work where the exposure times are limited to barely a second or more.
There is nothing wrong with taking single image nightscapes - it doesn’t mean you lack ability or are a beginner. Overcomplicating things isn’t a sign of being smart.
Some subjects really don’t suit perfectionist approaches. Trees, grasses, low clouds: they all move over exposure times of 10-20 seconds and will cause you headaches back home on the computer. I’ve even had stray aurora messing up the blending process in post.
Keep the weight minimal. Moving around a scene quickly and grabbing various compositions is valuable. The milky way doesn’t change, but you can make a series of very different images if you vary the foreground. Besides, you’ll already likely be tired because it’s 10pm, 2am, or 4am. Adding gear to your bag will only want to make you retreat inside the house, or to the car, especially if its cold (likely).
Instead of tracking or faffing with stacking, consider using the time available to focus stack or paint in some light. Black foregrounds are rarely attractive, and a sharp sky set against a soft, out-of-focus foreground looks bizarre.
There is no such thing as a perfect lens. Even the most expensive lenses for nightscapes, costing in the region of £1000-2000 will have some coma, astigmatism, chromatic abberation, vignetting, distortion etc.
Minor star trailing is OK, so don’t be too scared to use the 400 rule e.g. 400/focal length = length of exposure before detrimental star trailing.
The sensors on most modern cameras perform decently these days and thermal noise isn’t the problem it used to be.
Tracked long exposure images, even at low ISO values, can be extremely noisy.
Software such as Topaz DeNoise is your friend. I no longer take stacks of 10-15 images to blend and reduce noise. It’s time consuming in the field, time consuming on the computer, and your file storage quickly becomes choked.
Composition is everything. A strong composition will always beat a more technically sound shot that is otherwise uninspiring.
