Long night/sunrise/sunset exposure settings etc hints and tips please.

[AnzacPride]

Hey folks

Ive got a couple of weeks off soon and plan on getting up early and heading to the 12 apostles and surrounds for some early morning long exposures. I also plan on doing some night street scapes with long exposures.

I was just wondering what sorts of techniques you would recomend,ie what sort of iso,apeture etc would you use. I was also curious as to if I should have long exposure noise reduction in camera on, or leave it off and do all my noise reduction via lightroom(3.4).

Ill be using my Sigma 17-50mm 2.8 for these shots.

Cheers Dan

[Xenedis]

The length of exposure depends on the available light.

Re long exposure noise reduction (LENR), I strongly recommend this feature be disabled in the camera’s settings. The reason for this comes down to time.

The LENR feature works by firstly exposing the scene, and then immediately afterwards, making a black exposure (ie, with the shutter closed) for the same length of time, and combining the images using a technique called dark frame subtraction.

This obviously doubles the amount of time it takes to produce one image, and if you get it wrong, you've wasted potentially a lot of time on an image you'll need to re-shoot.

In addition, battery power will be consumed by the process, and you may need that for more important things, like capturing images.

Noise reduction can be done at a later stage on a much more powerful computer.

As far as exposure settings, it depends on the exposure time you want. If you usually shoot as ISO 100 as I do, and you've determined that your exposure will be, say, two hours, then increasing to ISO 200 will reduce your exposure time to an hour.

An appropriate aperture setting depends on the amount of depth of field you want, the focal length of the lens, and the exposure time.

If you use a wider lens (like a 16mm lens as I do), it has an inherently greater depth of field, so if you usually shoot at f/8 or f/11 as I do, you could reduce that to f/5.6 to reduce your exposure time by a considerable amount, depending on what you've calculated.