Photographing the Milky Way can be a challenging, yet truly magical experience. We’ve included 2 great videos here which offer some superb tips for shooting the Milky Way, and editing the images.
Typically, to shoot the Milky Way effectively you need a camera that handles well in low light (e.g. Nikon D800, Canon 6D, Canon 5D iii), and a decent lens that ideally has a maximum aperture of f/2.8.
It is far more advantageous to shoot with a full-frame sensor, not just because of the typically higher quality images, but because it is essential to capture interesting foreground elements with any Milky Way shot. For this, you need to go extremely wide, which a cropped sensor would struggle with.
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How To Photograph And Process The Milky Way
First, thanks so much for the content you are providing. I’m learning a lot and appreciate it. I’m working my way thru your luminosity tutorial, challenging but valuable. Also, thanks to the guys for the Milky Way video. Good stuff. I’d add the 500 or for some the 600 rule: 500 (or 600) divided by mm of the lens provides the longest shutter speed usable without star trails. For example, 600/24mm is about 25 seconds. The wider the lens, the longer the exposure can be without getting star trails. Thanks again.
Thank you very much for the important advice Mike!
Another excellent tutorial. I am somewhat confused though Jimmy. Just why do you need a FF camera to go wide? The image below was taken with my Olympus OMD-EM1 and a Samyang 7.5mm fisheye at ISO6400 (hence the distortion) using auto WB and has virtually no noise filtering or processing other than distortion correction for the land and a curves layer to increase contrast. It is a single jpg by the way. I also used my D7000 with a 10-20mm at the same ISO but it needed heaps of noise filtering. Unfortunately there was no decent foreground where I took these images and nothing anywhere nearby either.
OOps something happened to the image, sorry.