I havent tried much night-scaping, but it is definitely something I want to get better at. The other night I thought I would do some test shots and I realized I didn’t have my low light wide, which is a Canon 24mm 1.4 L

I decided to see what I could get with a Canon 16-35mm 2.8 L II on a Canon 5Diii .

The below shot was taken at f2.8. 1″ ISO 1600: (look how awful the noise is!)I knew it would be noisy, so I went down to ISO 400 and shot for 5 seconds:

Even at f2.8, 3.2″ and ISO 400- I was getting long exposure noise. (Theres a very red dot by the moon, that isnt a star lol)Lessons Learned:

– You have to have a very good low light lens, not much better than the Canon 24mm 1.4 L that I can think of. Just messing around in Las Vegas a few months ago got dramatically better shots with that lens.

– Lowest ISO possible, I am wanting 100. Probably anything over 400 is going to be a mess.

– Im wondering how the Canon 6D would do because it is so much less noisy, especially in higher ranges.

– I dont want to shoot too much longer than 3-5 seconds, simply because I want to see individual stars. Anything in the 10-15 second range stars can get “streaky” & it starts to introduce long exposure noise.
– Need to shoot with JPEG + RAW, with long exposure NR on. I shot this with RAW only, and once I started bumping up the ISO, it was a mess.

Im looking forward to trying this out again soon. Ill be trying a bunch of different things to see what can be learned, especially for those without special lenses or cannot bump up their ISOs beyond 400.