Fabio Antenore | 10 tips for better night photos
as part of our online Fototage
A post by Fabio Antenore:
About 6 months ago I started to think about what are the things ambitious hobby photographers are most interested in, in order to answer exactly these points in my (now published) video courses. I tried to create an intersection of the things that customers have asked me most at my workshops over the last 3.5 years. Of course, much of this was then incorporated into the planning. And I would like to share some of it with you here with these 10 tips for night photography.
Fabio AntenoreTip 1:
How do I know how long I can expose?
You have probably already heard of the so-called 500 rule. This is (or was) the formula for calculating exposure times at night without - due to the Earth's rotation - photographing the stars as lines. You simply divide 500 by the focal length used and the crop factor. For example, when using the SIGMA 14mm F1.8 DG HSM | Art on a full-frame camera, this results in 500:14 = 35.7s and when using an APS-C camera with a crop factor of 1.5, 500:(14*1.5) = 23.8s. Unfortunately, this rule was created at a time when our sensors had far fewer pixels. This means that where stars used to pass through a pixel in a certain time on a camera with, for example, 20MP, they now travel twice the distance in the same time on a camera with, for example, 40MP. This is why the 500 rule is no longer always so easy to apply. I recommend using the number 300 instead of 500 for cameras up to around 36MP and 210 for cameras up to around 50MP. These values have worked very well for me in practice so far.
