Overall Feeling & Impressions as well as any technical feedback is greatly appreciated!
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Sony A7rII
Canon 16-35 f/2.8ii @ 16mm
Metabones II
Miops Trigger
Slik Tripod
Sunwayphoto Ball Head
Sky: Foreground:
ISO 20000 ISO 8000
F/2.8 F/2.8
15sec. Exposure 91sec. Exp.
Sky and Foreground are both 30 frames stacked in Starry Landscape Stacker. Blended and edited in Photoshop and Lightroom. All shot on location in the same night.
I kept having something nagging at me after I left my first response and couldn’t put a finger on it until I did some editing and while I did bump up some clarity in the night sky and cloned the bridge cable on the ground out, something else kept nigging at me…and what it is, is with a night sky this bright, there should be some color reflectivity in the water and I don’t see it. I realize you were going with long exposure times but it was the stacking that likely caused this to occur. Have you ever tried a Move-Shoot-Move device where you can shoot a foreground and then the MW long exposure and do an easy blend. With the MSM, it is moving across the night sky at the same rate the MW is moving and you can do 20-60 sec exposures with perfect clarity. In Photoshop, it is a bit apparent you exposed the sky just a tad too long as the stars are beginning to elongate. I do like the setting and it begs for a reshoot.
This is a neat sort of shot to try, but frustrating. I like how you’ve treated the sky – a bit dramatic on the colors but not overdone tonally. The MW is a subject where I think we can take some liberties to bring out the subtle details. Even tracking with a long exposure, in my limited experience, can’t bring out much more detail than you have here.
The elongation in the stars in the corners is perspective distortion from that lens. It is unfortunately one of the worst lenses for shooting stars, with major coma, chromatic aberration and other artifacts in the corners at 16mm, and stopping down doesn’t help. Finding a good star lens is a Holy Grail quest. The best I have found is the Canon 17mm TS-E, with no shift, and it isn’t perfect. I recently read a reliable-sounding review (but I forget where) that the Sony 20mm f/1.8 was the best so far. I’d love to try one but as far as I know there is no adapter to the Canon mount.
I can see that the stars are not in good focus, which doesn’t help things. I don’t know your Sony body, but with my mirrorless Canon and the 17mm, I can zoom in and see the stars well enough to manually focus on them very accurately.
I swear by the Laowa 15mm f2 Zero-D which is available in both Sony and Canon (and Nikon) mirrorless mounts. I shoot it wide open. Makes good aperture stars, too, with its straight aperture blades. For astro, direct manual focus is a desirable feature.
