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by Charlie Woodrich on Thu Aug 13, 2015 11:20 am
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I thought I'd try and snap a few tonight. I'm fairly clear on the appropriate camera settings.  Just wondering which is the most effective lens from the list below.

21mm
16-35mm
70-200mm
150mm
300mm
400mm
600mm
 

by E.J. Peiker on Thu Aug 13, 2015 11:42 am
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My choice out of those would be the 21mm (assuming that's the Zeiss) since you can shoot it wide open and good results.
 

by DChan on Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:08 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote:My choice out of those would be the 21mm (assuming that's the Zeiss) since you can shoot it wide open and good results.


I suppose that doesn't take into consider what one wants the final photo looks like. The perspective of a 600 certainly is very different than that of a 21 :)
 

by E.J. Peiker on Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:57 pm
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DChan wrote:
E.J. Peiker wrote:My choice out of those would be the 21mm (assuming that's the Zeiss) since you can shoot it wide open and good results.


I suppose that doesn't take into consider what one wants the final photo looks like. The perspective of a 600 certainly is very different than that of a 21 :)
ROFLOL, now capturing a meteor with a 600 would be a demonstration of long lens technique.  The odds of actually capturing anything must be in the billions to 1 against.
 

by Charlie Woodrich on Thu Aug 13, 2015 1:28 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote:My choice out of those would be the 21mm (assuming that's the Zeiss) since you can shoot it wide open and good results.
Yup..it's a Zeiss.  Thanks
 

by DChan on Thu Aug 13, 2015 2:18 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote:
DChan wrote:
E.J. Peiker wrote:My choice out of those would be the 21mm (assuming that's the Zeiss) since you can shoot it wide open and good results.


I suppose that doesn't take into consider what one wants the final photo looks like. The perspective of a 600 certainly is very different than that of a 21 :)
ROFLOL, now capturing a meteor with a 600 would be a demonstration of long lens technique.  The odds of actually capturing anything must be in the billions to 1 against.


But,...the 600 is on his list :wink: :lol:
 

by E.J. Peiker on Thu Aug 13, 2015 2:49 pm
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Yes, even a 70-200 at 70mm is a very low probability proposition
 

by Brian Stirling on Thu Aug 13, 2015 3:50 pm
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My choice would be 35mm, but 21mm would also be a good choice.

Actually, since most meteor showers emanate from the same region of the sky (radiant) you could point even a 50mm in that direction and have success.


Brian
 

by OntPhoto on Thu Aug 13, 2015 9:30 pm
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Dang. I heard it was very good last night. Years ago I remember seeing a fireball come right across the road as I was driving.
 

by rnclark on Fri Aug 14, 2015 5:27 pm
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Here is my article on best lenses for meteor photography:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/nig ... hotography

I just got back from the peak of the shower. I got the most meteors with a 24 mm f/1.4 as predicted from my tables, close was 35 f/1.4 as predicted, and trailing distant by a large factor was an 18 mm f/2.8.

Size of the meteors in the frame is also important. With very wide angle, most meteors are small. Best is the ones in the 35 mm f/1.4. I also got a big green meteor trail in my 300 f/2.8.

Overall I got 90 to 100 meteors (I'm still counting) and I'm in the process of making a 250 frame nightscape mosaic.
 

by Jared. Lloyd on Sun Aug 30, 2015 8:33 am
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I realize that the meteor shower is long gone now, but something you should keep in mind when choosing a lens for something like this is the over all scene that you are going to try and create. I would argue that hands down your wide angle lenses (and especially if one is a Zeiss) are going to be your best options because of the physics that goes on between focal length and the speed at which the earth turns.

Night photography naturally calls for long exposures. But the longer the exposure, the more chance you have of star trails. Maybe this is what you are looking for with the otherwise stationary stars, but if you want pin pricks of light to anchor the scene and therefore emphasise the movement of the meteors across the sky, then you need to understand one of the variations of the 500 rule.

Ive heard this stated as the 400, 500, and 600 rule. 500 works fine for me.

Basically you take the focal length of the lens you want to shoot with and you divide that into 500. The quotient is the maximum number of seconds that you can get away with before stars begin to trail. . .

So let's say you are shooting with your 21mm Zeiss lens. You divide 21 into 500. The quotient is 23.8. So you can have a shutter speed up 20 seconds without introducing trails.

Do the math with one of your longer lenses, say the 300mm lens. 500/300 = 1.6. So you could only get away with a 1 second exposure before your stars begin to trail. Is this going to be long enough to capture a meteor? Is this going to be a long enough shutter speed to record enough light so you do not have to use extremely high ISO?

You might know all of this already. But it hadn't been mentioned in the conversation and so I wanted to bring this to the table. . .
 

by rnclark on Wed Sep 02, 2015 10:28 pm
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Jared. Lloyd wrote:I realize that the meteor shower is long gone now, but something you should keep in mind when choosing a lens for something like this is the over all scene that you are going to try and create. I would argue that hands down your wide angle lenses (and especially if one is a Zeiss) are going to be your best options because of the physics that goes on between focal length and the speed at which the earth turns.

Night photography naturally calls for long exposures. But the longer the exposure, the more chance you have of star trails. Maybe this is what you are looking for with the otherwise stationary stars, but if you want pin pricks of light to anchor the scene and therefore emphasise the movement of the meteors across the sky, then you need to understand one of the variations of the 500 rule.

Ive heard this stated as the 400, 500, and 600 rule. 500 works fine for me.

Basically you take the focal length of the lens you want to shoot with and you divide that into 500. The quotient is the maximum number of seconds that you can get away with before stars begin to trail. . .

So let's say you are shooting with your 21mm Zeiss lens. You divide 21 into 500. The quotient is 23.8. So you can have a shutter speed up 20 seconds without introducing trails.

Do the math with one of your longer lenses, say the 300mm lens. 500/300 = 1.6. So you could only get away with a 1 second exposure before your stars begin to trail. Is this going to be long enough to capture a meteor? Is this going to be a long enough shutter speed to record enough light so you do not have to use extremely high ISO?

You might know all of this already. But it hadn't been mentioned in the conversation and so I wanted to bring this to the table. . .
One factor you are forgetting is that regardless of how many seconds you hold the shutter open in meteor photography, meteors are moving fast, so the exposure per pixel is typically less than 0.01 second.  With meteors being faint, similar to the brightness of stars, and less than 1/100 second exposure, that main factor in recording meteors is enough aperture are to gather that feeble light.  Imagine recording stars with 1/100 second exposures!

Here are my results:

http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/ga ... 0vc2s.html

http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/ga ... c1sky.html

I recorded only 4 meteors with my 15 mm f/2.8 wide angle lens over several hours, but 26 meteors per hour over 3 hours with my 24 f/1.4.

Roger
 

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