Sunday, May 31, 2009

Spirits in the Sky



For the past couple of nights I've been taking advantage of both some beautiful night skies and the low-light capabilities of my new Canon 5D Mark II camera. This camera is just awesome for making night images. The image above is a 30 second exposure taken at ISO 3200, which I never could have done with my old camera. The old camera at ISO 3200 would have had so much noise that the image would have been unusable. By using such a high ISO setting, the camera was also able to pick up the Milky Way in the image.



The image above is a 2 hour exposure made between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. This image was shot at ISO 100, but even with such a low ISO setting, at 2 hours most cameras would still be producing unacceptable noise levels. Not so with the 5D Mark II! The image is very clean, with very acceptable noise levels. It should be noted that in the above image, the glow of light on the horizon is not from the sun or the moon, but rather from the city lights of Thunder Bay, Ontario, which is about 40 miles away.

The image below was a 1.5 hour exposure, taken this time from 2:30 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. This time of year, by 3:30 a.m. the sky is already starting to show signs of light from the coming sun, and by running the exposure until 4:00 a.m. the final image looks almost like the blue sky that you see during the day.

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