How does Peter Lik manage to capture the stars in such detail in the following photograph?

Question

Here's the picture:

I'm curious to know what techniques (i.e. shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc...) he uses to capture the stars so vibrantly (assuming it wasn't Photoshopped). I'm guessing it was taken with a long exposure but I'm sure there's more to that. Was any special equipment and/or lenses used? Are photographs like this possible on prosumer DSLRs (i.e. Canon 7D)?

Answer 1

A very long exposure doesn't help with shots like this due to the rotation of the Earth. Depending on your field of view you can get star trails (where instead of individual points of light you get lines where the stars have moved relative to the camera) with exposures of only 10 seconds. With a wide angle lens you can get away with longer exposures, e.g. 30 seconds.

A tracking mount can eliminate star trails for pure astro shots, but this shot has a sharp foreground element which means short exposure (unless multiple exposures/tracking mounts and photoshop were involved, benefit of the doubt let's say they weren't). Fortunately modern DSLRs are far better in low light than film cameras ever were, and to make up the short exposure you can amplify the signal (by raising the ISO setting). Even a really noisy image can look good when resized for the web so don't be afraid to set the ISO as high as you need for a proper exposure.

In summary this sort of image can be shot using a 7D with the following conditions:

• Cloudless skies
• No light pollution (a long way from any human settlement)
• Fast lens, ideally f/1.4
• Single exposure 10-30 seconds
• Crank up the ISO!
• Noise reduction + massive downsize for the web.

For an example of what is possible with a single exposure and no special equipment see the following image by Jeffrey Sullivan:

(c) Jeffrey Sullivan

30 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 6400

Answer 2

Short of asking Peter Lik himself, or finding he posted the techniques online, I could only speculate on which techniques he actually did use. I am assuming he did post processing. Some possibilities include:

1. Start with a good dark sky location. The Australian outback has a lot of that. Some places elsewhere are also good (at times).
2. Use prime focus premium quality fast lenses, shot fully open, or nearly so (a stop or two back), with a well calibrated infinity focus.
3. Filter out the spectral peaks common to artificial light sources (sodium and mercury lines, for example).
4. Use a telescope motorized polar mount to keep each exposure better aligned.
5. Take multiple shots and do realigned stacking in post processing.
6. Use focus bracket post processing (even though you did not change focus during shooting) to select each pixel from the stack for best sharpness.
7. Add the silhouette foreground in post processing to avoid it being blurred relative to the stars.
8. Post process for best contrast and color.

Answer 3

I want to give you my own perspective, trying to fix something in the answers above.

1. I will not recommend high ISO because higher ISO introduces considerable noise in my images. examples are below.
2. 30 Sec exposure is too long. With that exposure, you will actually see trails of star not just a point star.

I would recommend

1. A clear bright sky. You see abundant of stars with naked eye esp big ones are really bright.
2. You have a good quality lens
3. Full frame sensor camera
4. 10 Sec exposure
5. Low ISO (keeps the dark dark)
6. Manual focus (auto focus will likely not work as in my case)
7. Correct lighting condition set ( I don't know which one but may incandescent?)
8. Enhance the image later after you take the shot.

Here are my images now.

15s, f/5.6,ISO 1000

15s, f/5.6, ISO 640

You can see significant reduction in radiant light at ISO 640 vs ISO 1000 (2nd image is better than first).

The following I took at 30s, f/5.6, ISO 2500. With this long exposure you can clearly see the star trail as they move (shown at top right corner)

30s, f/5.6, ISO 2500.

Edit Here is another pic that I took on the same night after some photo editing in Picassa.

Answer 4

I've recently asked a friend how did he managed to take this kind of pictures, just out of pure curiosity, here is all the process:

"I use a motorized equatorial mount. You do not do a single exposure but several which are then overlapped using software. Because of high noise levels which is one hour of exposure, one has to make various types of pictures: LightFrame (with light), Darkframes (to mitigate the noise (making the same ISO and same exposure time), and still flatframes (these are used to remove dust from the image sensor or optical elements. All in all, this photo was taken nearly 800 photos in raw. Thus, lights 120 + 120 + 120 darks flats. The lights and darks logically have 30" each, the flats are made with the maximum shutter speed with the field of view uniformly illuminated. It takes a lot of work but it also gives much joy to get a picture that without all this work would not resemble anything :)"

Be sure to know, that a sky like that and foreground in the picture requests photo editing software, there is no way to get details of a night sky like that in a exposure time that wouldn't create trails.

The picture that made me ask him his method his here, the method:

Answer 5

I think the Tree Of The Universe as Peter calls it was a series of shots created with HDR software or maybe Deep Sky Stacker. D.S.S. is free on the net for downloading. I also think he got that photo with one of his Mamiya cameras. Mucho dollars !

Answer 6

These are all good inputs, but Lik posted the equipment used on his site. Yes, he used a stacking technique (involving multiple cameras - YIKE$$$!), yes, the dark sky exposure stuff is all great advice, but the real trick is he used Nikon's D810A Astrophotography camera. It's special feature: no infrared filter. This allows more color from stars to get recorded on the sensor. So to answer your question, no, a prosumer camera, or (currently) any Canon camera, could not achieve these same results.