Thoughts on Astrophotography (March 2004)
The items below are a mix of tips and thoughts (opinions) that have percolated upwards in my mind that may or may not enhance your attempts at astrophotography. Please read with CAUTION<g>. I have links to the core sites one needs to reference to get the techniques for successful astrophotography. This will be my evolving "tip sheet" to cover those things that I have learned from other places or on my own and are probably the most common mistakes I see by others.
1. Calibrate your monitor! Sorry to shout, but if you don't have your monitor calibrated with a spyder or similar quality device, then no enhancement that you do with your monitor will matter.
2. Learn photography. This is the process that I am in right now. I began astrophotography with little knowledge of photography and actually felt that little photographic knowledge was needed. I was dead wrong. The more I learn about photography, the better my astrophotography has become. Study many types of photography from landscapes to portrait. Read all you can stand about composition, lighting, zones, histograms, CCDs, Photoshop, and on and on. It is a never ending source of material. I made the mistake of trying to find my astrophotographic eye by looking at astrophotography. While it is good to study the work of others in astrophotography, it is very beneficial to study the work of others in other photographic disciplines as well. Here are the two main resources I use to develop my photography skills: < http://luminous-landscape.com/ > < http://www.beautiful-landscape.com/index.html >
3. Buy Jerry Lodriguss' "Photoshop for Astrophotography" and read it thoroughly.
4. The Milky Way is not black. The more I image with relatively fast optics, f6 or less, the more I realize that when imaging in the Milky Way, there is a great deal of dust and nebulosity that exists. Enhancing and color balancing an image based on a "black" or "dark blue" Milky Way will most likely lead to a less than optimal result. I am not saying to never have a black or dark background, but it should be a very smooth transition from nebula to dark and picking color balance areas of empty sky needs to be done very carefully to have the most well-balanced color possible.
5. I encourage you to seek out as a final output a large print of your image. I know my results have improved as I have made this my final goal. Large prints reveal many flaws that a computer monitor at smaller image scale will not.
6. Film is in its heyday! Yep, I said it. I believe with the wide availability of quality APO telescopes, two very good choices in slide film (E200 and Provia 400), one potentially great print film (Konica Centuria 400), ever improving digital enhancement techniques with Photoshop and other software, and high quality scanners to reach maximum dynamic range, film images are only going to get better. I especially embrace medium format and believe that film options will be around in this size for quite some time. For me, there is not a more efficient way to capture RGB images at the quality I prefer for large prints in the image scale I prefer than to use medium format film on fast optics. I love CCD imaging, but for me, to get the quality I desire out of CCD requires a permanent setup with access to a wide swath of sky (which I do not have) and much more time than it takes for me to acquire the same image size with film. For me, it is more efficient to use film and I spend more time with my family as a result.
7. For the current crop of slide films (E200 and Provia 400), one really needs to use the fastest optics available. It is my experience that these films really don't continue to capture photons beyond the one hour mark. I say this based on my experience with my f8 AP 130EDT. I exposed from 60 minutes to two hours and found no additional benefit with the extended exposures. That is why I moved to an AP 130 f6 for imaging with film. I believe there is not much need to go beyond the 60 minute mark with exposures with these films.
8. The web is a really insufficient way to view any images. By the time you factor in .jpg compression, image size, monitor color differences, monitor brightness differences, color profile managment or the lack of by any web browser, color profile conversion from Adobe RBG to sRGB: the only true way to see an image as it is intended to be seen is to either see it on the calibrated monitor on which the image was adjusted or see the final print.
More to come...
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