TECHNIQUE ASSESSMENT

Is our stargazer ready to capture some night skies? Alyn shares pointers for setting up his eos Dslr...

LIGHT Up THE night

for night photos when you’re far from city lights, you need to get as much light as possible into your lens and onto your Canon DSLR’S sensor. To do this, shoot in Manual mode, and open the aperture to maximum on your wide-angle lens – e.g. f/2.8 or f/4 – and set your ISO really high to around 3200 (depending on light pollution in the sky). Also set a shutter speed around 20-30 seconds. Take a test shot, and if your scene and the stars in the sky are still too dark, increase your ISO to 6400. More on ISO below…

High iso To ITS Limits

“You’ll need to shoot at a high ISO when you want to capture the stars at night. Push your Canon DSLR’S ISO performance to its limits. My trusty 6D is very good at preserving detail at high ISO settings up to 6400,” Alyn says, “I actually think the high ISO performance is better on the 6D than on the new 6D Mk II.” Thomas’s top-of-the-tree pro Canon 1D X Mark II captures fairly noise-free images up to ISO10000. But switch off the Long Exposure Noise Reduction in your menu, as it will take a second exposure as long as your first to merge with your original. At ISO1600 and over, this setting can actually make images look grainier. Afterward you can reduce the noise of your Raw images in photo processing software like Photoshop and Lightroom.