More lens pr0n: http://www.thephoblographer.com/2013...orthy-of-note/

Just got back from a family vacation to Costa Rica. Couldn't help myself with taking pictures of a little ATV that I rented for a day and spent a LOT of gas on the beach with...

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5334/9...755d1151_b.jpg
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3814/9...9d3791b5_b.jpg

I like the soft dreamy feel of the backlighted shot of the little girl. It's cool how you were able to save a difficult shot. It might be cool if you left the color in the girl and flattened the background to black and white since it's nearly that way already. Just a thought. Oh and brush out those internal lens reflections.

Those lenses are fandonkulous. :eek:

All shot with my D7k w/16-85mm walk around lens. Could have been set up better, but I was too busy enjoying the awesome views in real life.

A tripod is definitely required for shooting the stars. Remote triggers are not necessarily required (but they're cheap and make life so much easier) since you can use your camera's timer to open the shutter without causing the camera to shake, and I don't care how steady your hand is, the image will blur slightly when you push the shutter release on the body itself. My settings vary greatly between shooting in the city and out in the country as well as how long I want the shot. This first one I was capturing a flyby of the International Space Station so I wanted a longer exposure to capture as much of the transit as possible without having the city lights over-expose the sky. This was taken at 10pm last night and the sky still wasn't done transitioning from twilight to night:

18-55 kit lens at 18mm, f3.5, ISO320 for 25 seconds


This second shot is from that campout and I just pointed to a fairly dense area and took a shot. The big difference equipment and setting-wise is that I used my 28mm prime (effectively 42mm for my camera) for this shot and the aperture wide open at f/1.8, ISO800 for 10 seconds. If you're after a constellation portrait, you're going to need a fairly wide angle lens depending on how big the constellation is and what sort of landscape you want to frame it with. The wider your lens, the longer you can leave your shutter open before you start to notice star trails. An f/1.8 setting will give you the shortest exposures but the stars can get a little blobby during longer exposures, especially if you're not perfectly focused which can be difficult to do at night. I usually shrink it down to f/2 to f/2.8, which helps the stars appear more like pinpoints. With just a tripod, you can get good portraits at ISO800 for 10-15 seconds without it being too noisy. Ideally, I'd like to run ISO400 for 20-30 seconds at f/2.8-3.5 but for that I need a tracking mount of the sort you'd find at a good telescope shop to keep the stars from trailing, which is a whole different kind of cool shot but requires you leave your shutter open for an hour or more for some really long trails.

Anyhoo, the advantages of a dark and remote sky are pretty blatant, if I had used the same setup last night, it would probably look like I took the picture in the late afternoon and all but the brightest stars would be washed out. Out in the sticks, the camera can pick out stars that are magnitude 7 or so with those settings, maybe even a little dimmer. The dimmest star a typical human eye can pick out is magnitude 5-ish, and I didn't even see those satellites in this shot. By contrast, the ISS was at magnitude -4 last night, which is about as bright as Venus, pretty darn bright in other words.



At any rate, there are whole books written on just astrophotography so I could go on and on, the nice thing about DSLRs today is that it's so much easier to do the trial and error process and much cheaper than when I was a kid using FujiColor Super G 800 film!

Good stuff titan!

...

Hey, Titan, thanks for the lengthy reply. I live in the city and the opportunity to do night shots only happen when we go camping, which isn't too often.

I didn't even notice the satellites in the 2nd shot originally. Anyway, thanks for the great tips. I need to get a better tripod and a remote. The tripod is something I picked up for $5 at a yard sale. Pretty flimsy.

OK. So I lied. Here's another from the Hot Rod Nationals. I still consider myself a rank amateur, but sometimes I look at a picture and think, "Man. I like that". Not bragging, just wanted to share with you guys.

http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/g...hNSRA-7072.jpg

Had yesterday off and took the Z to the local wetlands preserve. Got a few nature shots...

http://i1313.photobucket.com/albums/...pse7361401.jpg

http://i1313.photobucket.com/albums/...psf9158185.jpg

Love the 1st one and the last 1, Mike. Where were these shot?

Man I tried to do some star shots a few nights ago and it came out horrible. I have this problem where my camera won't focus right in the dark, and if it does it won't take the picture. I tried to manually focus which didn't work well cause I couldn't see the stars through the viewfinder, so I tried focusing on some lights far down the road and using that setting to shoot the stars. Most of them came out blurry. The ones that were in focus were really grainy and pixelated. I know the stock lens isn't all that, but I've taken some pretty good night shots with it before, so I'm not sure what was wrong. I really want to know why the hell it's having the focusing problem. Keeps saying the subject is too dark.
Anyway, if you guys have any suggestions I'd love to hear them. It was a Nikon D5100, stock lens, 100iso, 20-30 sec exposure, 4.5f. When they came out grainy I tried going to a 10 sec exposure with a 650iso. didn't really help at all.


I survived Zdayz 2013... (barely)

Btw this is a pic that I took at Zdayz that I kinda liked :)


http://img.tapatalk.com/d/13/08/15/ydy3umav.jpg

And I really liked the way this pretty little GTR came out...

http://img.tapatalk.com/d/13/08/15/yde7udy7.jpg


I survived Zdayz 2013... (barely)

I just recently got a Nikon D3200 and am loving it! All I have is the standard 18-55mm lens and a polarizer right now. I'll be looking to get another lens soon and this thread has a lot of awesome info. Here are a couple I've taken, still need to get a program for editing too.

My car is very dirty but I like the picture a lot lol.
http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps516b0348.jpg

Cars that I wish were mine lol
http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2545a494.jpg

http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps99aa87ab.jpg

http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps8b8ac3d5.jpg

Some pictures I took while I was recently in Alaska
http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9b8df85d.jpg

http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps768e43a9.jpg

http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps05884589.jpg

http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...ps54c715b3.png

The colors in the ice were amazing to see
http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...psd952847a.jpg

http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/...psb66f5c1c.jpg


Any feedback or advice is greatly appreciated!