night photography

[Valerio Tarone]

a question particurarly for Roman. I've boughta Nkion D300 with the idea,also not only, to do night photos. i've read some articles. Are my equipment fit? :
1 zoom sigma 17-35 f2,8
2 to be far away at leat 20km. from a town. A village, with a lot of cars, at 20 km ?
3bubble level, a strong torch: i've got them.
4 use noise reduction and turnig down the mirror, Yes!
Sufficient or not?

[Roger Clark]

Valerio,

I assume you mean night photography with stars, like the recent postings in the landscape forum of Roman's images from the Tetons, correct? If so, I think your equipment is fine. One thing, record raw and don't do noise reduction on until post processing, There are reports that Nikon raw is not really raw in that it runs a median filter on the raw data before the data are written to the memory card, and faint stars might be deleted. I don't know how much of an issue this might be on current cameras, and is worth testing if a concern.

Roger

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Valerio,
Very good advice on the noise reduction by Roger. I do not use the in camera stuff with Canon either! I do think your equipment is fine and try different ISO when trying it. The further away from the light pollution of cities and cars.....the less ISO you would probably need. The lens look fine too and I use it at 17mm and include more sky....and the 2.8 is a plus! Focusing is the most difficult so turn the AF off. Make sure that tripod is tight so the rest is just experimenting when "painting" the FG subject! Good luck and loking forward to seeing some of the results!

[Valerio Tarone]

YES I've seen thev Teton's images. ISo 6400 30 sec.
Thank you