Night photography tips

Sittatunga wrote:

Nipar wrote:

Dear friends,

I am an old m50 owner and in my backpag there are three lenses: 11-22, 32, 55-250.

In the last trip I realized the beautiful 32mm hasn't IS..:D

I'd use a tripod for all of these, and manual focus.

The incoming trip I'd like to be ready for a kind of photography I'd like to shot:

Is it possible according to you to get something similar with our camera and these lenses?

In particular - do you have any nice tutorial to learn some skill to take pictures similar to the second one with the lamp light beam?

I tried with the 32mm but I couldn't stand so much as 20-30seconds (with ISO 400) without moving and at the end the beam burnt the picture...

Maybe have the jeep heading into the image rather than cutting off its nose. ISO 1600 would have still given a good result with 5-8s exposure. A less bright torch would have helped too, but I'm not a fan of phallic torch beams.

Any help will be appreciated

PS:

this is so far what I achieved to get with the 11-22:

That's really good, specially for an f/4 lens. The Samyang (Rokinon in the USA) 12mm f/2 is 4x as bright, easier to focus manually and stays in focus of the camera goes to sleep.

I agree, it will be a bit of a challenge to get low-light results with the f4 zoom, but it is possible with a tripod and good planning.

The 32mm f1.4 is a fantastic lens for low light, but your intended use needs to have a 'nifty fifty' angle of view ---- which is possible, but often night scenes lend themselves better for wide angle use (as with the Milky way shot here).

Normally I shoot astro with the 22mm f2, Sigma 16mm f1.4, or Rokinon 12mm f2 for that reason. The 22mm f2 is an outstanding low light lens for its price and is the cheapest lens I mention, it's just wide enough to be quite usable for astro. But a manual focus lens is preferable, if possible, for the reasons Sittatunga mentions.

In low light post-processing becomes important - RAW shooting and using software such as Topaz de-noise or my favorite DxO PhotoLab 5 gives very good results with little to no noise.

Best advice is to practice, practice, practice with the lens and setup you want well in advance. It's too easy to make simple mistakes when it really counts if you don't have enough experience shooting at night. In the dark you have to really know your equipment and what you want to do, to get good results.

Thank you!