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How I photograph the Milky Way with medium format film
- rb808 6y agoIts a good time to recommend Southern Hemisphere for star gazing, the milky way is much more visible its overwhelming.
- frandroid 6y agoThanks, adding this as a reason to visit Oceania. :)
- gizajob 6y agoThat's what I'd call a photographer...
- rrmm 6y agoI wish I lived in a less light-polluted area. Was out in the country a few months ago and the view was amazing. If you have the opportunity avail yourself of it.
- thanatropism 6y agoThe unsaid detail is tha the he’s using E36 (slide; positive image) stock. I don’t understand why the C41 (negative) process/product became default for consumer grade color photography. I know there’s professional negative film that’s tuned for the human skin. But as an amateur that happened to snag a lot of really high quality (mostly 135) film in bulk on eBay, I’ve always felt overall happier with my legible developed film, the highly contrasted and colorful images and the noticeable flavor of different product lines.
- lm28469 6y ago> I don’t understand why the C41 (negative) process/product became default for consumer grade color photography. Much better dynamic range, which means you can throw a c41 roll in any camera with an half working meter and you'll get an usable picture. Over or under expose a slide by 1 stop and you're already asking for troubles. Negatives are also much easier to scan than positives, and possibly easier to print but I'm not very familiar with that.
- danielfoster 6y agoThis. I love shooting E6 slide film for landscapes, but it is very unforgiving if the exposure is even slightly off.
- ginko 6y ago>possibly easier to print but I'm not very familiar with that. As of now they're pretty much the only way to dark-room print from color film as there is no more paper or chemicals for color-positive prints being made anymore. There used to be Cibachrome/Ilfochrome which was apparently highly regarded, but production of that ended a couple years ago. Apparently there's a way to reversal process regular RA-4 color paper, but I never tried it. Essentially you expose your paper, then process it in black&white chemistry. After that you wash the paper and expose it again with white light. You then process the paper in RA-4 color chemistry. What's kinda cool about the second processing is that you can do it in the light. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry6ycSgT8g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry6ycSgT8g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNjLzzH438E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNjLzzH438E
- gorgoiler 6y agoTetenal Colortec has a product for E6. Their C41 chemistry was very smelly at 100F but it worked first time in my kitchen sink. Their E6 kit might be worth a try: Random link: <$3 a roll... https://www.freestylephoto.biz/102036-Tetenal-Colortec-E-6-Developing-Kit-2.5-Liters https://www.freestylephoto.biz/102036-Tetenal-Colortec-E-6-D...
- subhro 6y agoThe full frame photo the author has posted seems to say Kodak Ektar 100, that is a C41 stock.
- zoul 6y agoThe Provia is slide (E6), though.
- microdrum 6y agoDoes anyone know of a similar guide for digital sensors, since they can do these images with very different exposure times?
- lm28469 6y agoDigital has other issues like hot pixels and more noise on longer exposures, they usually do a couple (dozens, hundreds, ..) of shorter exposures and stack them in post prod. It's basically the same process otherwise.
- joshvm 6y agoThere is a huge volume of literature for astrophotography - I think most random hits you'd get on Google will be OK (the vast majority will be digital oriented). For example: http://www.astropix.com/html/i_astrop/toc_ap.html http://www.astropix.com/html/i_astrop/toc_ap.html I can probably give a better recommendation if you have a particular goal in mind. There are plenty of guides on how to take photos of the Milky Way with an SLR, but astrophotography is a broad (and quickly very expensive) field to get into. If you're interested in a more technical angle, you can look at the Handbook of CCD Astronomy (Howell, 2006) which also discusses noise issues in detail. Nowadays we're moving to CMOS though. However when you go for astrophysics books they tend to focus more on measuring intensities accurately (photometry) rather than getting pretty pictures. Although one nitpick with the article - tracking mounts do not follow the rotation of the Earth, they rotate in the opposite direction.
- Stratoscope 6y ago> Although one nitpick with the article - tracking mounts do not follow the rotation of the Earth, they rotate in the opposite direction. Maybe I missed something, but I don't see where the article contradicts what you wrote above. The one thing I did find seems correct (as it doesn't specify the direction): "With film and these very long exposures, the Earth’s rotation is a big problem — you’ll end up with star trails (which is a fun type of photo to take). The solution to this problem is a star tracker, a mount that precisely rotates your camera at the same rate as the Earth (known as sidereal rate)."
- pcurve 6y ago(deleted)
- bagels 6y agoYou are in the Milky Way Galaxy.
- Finnucane 6y agoIf you don't mind shooting in B&W, Fuji Acros has relatively little reciprocity failure. Fuji claims no correction is needed up to two minutes of exposure (I've never tested that myself, I should say!).
- leejo 6y agoCan confirm. Here's a 20 minute exposure of Orion + moonlight over the Grand Muveran I shot in the village a couple of years ago: https://leejo.github.io/images/2018/large_format/36_muveran_1750.jpg https://leejo.github.io/images/2018/large_format/36_muveran_... # this is shot on 4x5 film, and unfortunately Fuji don't make Acros in this size anymore (fortunately I stocked up on it).
- LolWolf 6y agoOh my god that is a beautiful shot! The rest of these are also gorgeous... how do you develop them? / do you do prints at all?
- leejo 6y agoDevleoped in my sink using an SP-445 tank. B&W chemistry is pretty straightforward. I do prints (check my site for contact details). There's a couple more examples of 4x5 work on my Instagram (ha!) haven't got much of it up on my site yet. I'm not the photographer from the article BTW...
- LolWolf 6y agoOh I know, but your shots specifically are lovely! I will check it out :) I imagined you did it at home... have wanted to do the same but haven’t had space, so use the mail-in services which are not bad.
- pedrovhb 6y agoGorgeous shot!
- m3kw9 6y agoI think taking the photograph yourself vs just looking at one makes a big difference in wow factor.
- gerikson 6y agoI love that to be able to take these images he uses a digital camera + software (the pole tracker)
- Stratoscope 6y agoIn fact, two digital cameras, a QHYCCD PoleMaster for polar alignment, and an ASI120MC-S with PHD2 software for more precise guiding.
- jbverschoor 6y agoI love how these timelapses let you experience the fact that we’re all moving in something bigger.
- 205guy 6y agoMy god, it’s full of stars! Beautiful shots, I particularly like the double-exposure self-portrait at the end, knowing it was made in-camera. I used to do B&W star tracks because getting a mechanical tracker to work accurately was so fiddly before. I like the idea of using pole-finding and star-tracking digital cameras and software, I know satellites and some planes use it, but I didn’t realize it was available off-the-shelf.
- joeraut 6y agoThis. It just seems really special to be sharing the film with photons that made a journey of many, many light-years to reach it too.
- Trombone12 6y ago> "a star tracker, a mount that precisely rotates your camera at the same rate as the Earth" It's called an equatorial mount! GAH! Incidentally that setup they post a picture of looks pretty sketchy, looks like the counterweight will bonk the table if you expose for too long and you also have to move the table rather than the mount to point in another azimuth.
- helij 6y agoI don't see any issues with caling this mount a star tracker that precisely rotates your camera. It's Sky Watcher Star Adventurer and it tracks automatically. If you call it just EQ mount you have to add that it does automatic tracking ;)
- SiempreViernes 6y agoIsn’t the actuall star tracker is the little camera on the guide scope though? Or maybe it’s the software that reads the camera data...
- gdubs 6y agoAmazing. I got into film photography in college with Holga cameras — toys, essentially, which had the wonderful upside of using medium format film, as well as introducing all kinds of “happy accidents”. It was not a cheap hobby in terms of developing costs, etc. But film is pretty magical. Waiting to get negatives back was exciting. (This “lomography” — Holgas, etc — inspired apps like Instagram in the beginning.) Really cool to see artists keeping these formats alive. I do a lot of digital work, and I don’t think format alone defines the art — but again, there’s some real magic in film.
- pedrovhb 6y agoAdmirable dedication! It feels like a crime to go so far with medium format and not show large resolution scans, though. Maybe it's to avoid hurting the sale of prints? Understandable I guess, but considering the amazing resolution you can get from medium format, this just really leaves me itching to see a large image.