Photography tips and tricks

[lino6]

Took this as a test run for the eclipse tonight. This is a cropped pic of a few I took last night.

[BMux]

Great pics, thanks for sharing 

[grantm]

Ok what am I doing wrong, besides heaps, this was taken with long shutter 20 seconds or there abouts, am liking night pics alot, but struggle with a couple of areas, mainly focus I can not seem to get clear sharp image regardless of shutter speed etc, what is the trick for focus at night when you can't see anything in view finder or screen.

[BMux]

Nice idea on the photo.

#1 tip in the dark would be to use a tripod and remote trigger or use the timer and don't touch the camera! Use your widest lens that you have as well, not super zoom.

[grantm]

Nice idea on the photo.

#1 tip in the dark would be to use a tripod and remote trigger or use the timer and don't touch the camera! Use your widest lens that you have as well, not super zoom.

Yep used tripod, was my widest lens, remote trigger would help for sure, the flare off the moon is a problem every shot I took has same result

[BMux]

Live view is useful if you can see stars, the moon looks really bright so you should be able to focus on it with liveview? Anyway, zoom manually using live view on to one of the brightest stars, do not use autofocus as it's no good for photographing the night sky.

For focusing on far away objects such as the moon in that photo set the lens via manual focus, turn it till you get the infinity sign. You could also try line up the focus point on the camera with the edge of the moon and press down the shutter button halfway to focus, then check the liveview. You should probably use an f-stop of between 8 to 16 (every lens has a sweet spot too) which would help get everything in focus.

With your exposure of 20 seconds ... what focal length were you using on the camera?

[grantm]

was using my 18 - 55, set at 18 or widest, manual focus, was only using the shutter priority letting camera chose aperture, but set ISO to 100 to try and reduce noise . Live view could pick up moon no worries and reflection on the water, just found it hard to get a sharp focus when light was reduced, and with moon so tiny in the live view could not really tell if it was in focus or not, but could use auto at all unless I put the bigger lens on.

[BMux]

Ok then the 20 seconds using 18mm should be fine. Google the "rule of 600" for astrophotography.

Try my original suggestion with focus to infinity and the f-stop between f8 to f16. Also worth trying with a shorter exposure of 10 seconds, with the f-stop around f4 to f8. Would be interesting to see how the crop sensor handles with such a bright moon. That might have thrown the camera off a bit.

Make sure you shoot in raw as well, you can edit much more in photoshop that way.

[lino6]

So I missed the eclipse, but this low light photography has tweaked an interest. I have been googling settings etc. and have been experimenting. This was taken with our Canon 600D with the Tamron 150-600mm lens.

Think I might look into a photography course now!

[grantm]

I agree Lino, is fun to play with, nice moon, I decided to read a bit more of my cameras manual, discovered it has a zoom function up to 10 times, when using the live view, makes it easy to manual focus on something very distant, might read a bit more of the manual, great thing with digital costs nothing to experiment.

[lino6]

These aren't the typical "moon" photos I take but this is a family forum   

But would like to do some sort of training. The local TAFE has 5 nights for $250 which might be the go. Googling the settings is fine, but I would like to know what they are all about.

[BMux]

For those interested, the videographer at the IVenture course yesterday was using a drone to capture us driving up and over a steep hill. He was using the first version of the Phantom with a GoPro, but mentioned the newer version has everything included out of the box:

http://www.dji.com/product/phantom-2-vision

Will be interesting to see how the video turns out when they release it.

[grantm]

Oh dear, I just looked at that link, that thing is simply awesome, now I want one,

[BMux]

Haha yes, it is awesome. The controls looked great, really accurate and very easy to fly by the looks of it.

[Motty]

Hi guys. I have a Canon 6D with all prime lenses. Have a 24mm 1.6, 50mm 1.8, 85mm 1.4, 100mm Macro and 200mm 1.8. Love photography with a main passion for landscapes and portraits. Very soon getting into using Drones for a bit of fun. I use lightroom and photoshop. Will post some pics when i get on computer later tonight.