Namibia photos on Flickr

Plan your trip to some dark sky location, like Namibia, Atacama, Bolivia, Australia. Any suggestions of your favorite locations are appreciated in comments.

Plan the position of the milky way and southern cross (stars will "spin" over southern cross). I use @photopills app for planning

1) I used wide angle, 14-24 mm Nikkor + Nikon D850, and 24 mm on my second, d810 (24-70). This image is from shots on D810.

2) I setup 25 s shutter speed, f/2.8, iso 4000. Why 25s? I also wanted to make timelapse + pick up single stills (single frame 25 s with stars as dots, not trails)

You can use rule of "500" to calculate right shutter speed for your lens. Let's say, you use 20 mm lens, then it's 500/20=25 s

3) Iso is high to get more stars and colors. If you don't want timelapse and stills, but your main goal are colorful star trails then it's better to use iso ~1600.

3) use fast lenses, like 1.8 or 2.8. Lenses with aperture 4 is usually much darker for night photography. You can make lens suggestions in comments, my choice is 14-24 nikkor lens.

4) I used in-camera interval timer. Check if you camera has one. Otherwise you need programmable remote release. Nikon cameras have interval timer.

5) I setup interval 2 s between shots. 1 s might be bad as camera will not have enough time to write a photo on sd card + overheat the sensor==increase noise

6) for Nikon cameras there's a crazy thing you should know about: interval there means not 2 s between shots, but time before start of exposure and finish + 2 s. For example, in my case of 25 s shutter speed + 2 s interval, the "Nikon interval" is 27 s!

7) on d850 I used electronic shutter, so it was possible to get 700 shots against to 400 on d810

8) after sequence of images is done, make a "blue hour" photo, or photo with light in the scene. For both published images I used a blue hour photo with 15 s shutter speed, iso 320 and f/7.1

That will make foreground with much better quality and get rid of hot pixels.

9) I use starstax software to merge all sequence into one star trail image

10) before merging photos I process one photo (usually from middle of the sequence), increasing saturation and vibrance a lot and meanwhile decreasing blue channel saturation in HSL

Decreasing exposure -2 ev if it's shot on iso 4000. Highlights and whites are also decreased.

11) process in Photoshop merging blue hour shot and star trail shot. You can use my techniques from Danielkordantutorials.com including luminosity masks to bring awesomeness to nice photo

Namibia-2753 by Francesca Braghetta

Namibia by Marco Di Leo

Namibia Sossusvlei

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