Category Archives: Photography

#50by50ish #37 – Take a photography course

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Back in 2016, I decided to “up my game” for photography, and I thought I would start with a class or two. Henry’s courses are popular, but there are also courses through the city’s annual learning catalog, and even through Algonquin College if I want to get really serious. But I wanted to keep it simple, so I started watching The Great Course’s “Fundamentals of Photography” series (Learning photography – Introduction).

Recently, as part of my lingering 50by50 commitments, I wanted to get back into photography learning, but even in the last two years, my approach has changed. I have a decent camera — a Canon Rebel T5i aka the 700D — and it works well for me. It is considered a high-value entry level DSLR, but my needs are relatively modest, with just a couple of quirks.

My primary need is outdoors photography … waterfalls, landscapes, flora and fauna, hiking through nature, and friends and family doing both active and passive activities.

My secondary need, like most people, is indoor photography … birthdays, parties, events, holidays.

My quirky needs are both related to astrophotography — first, attached to the scope (body only) or second, straight Milky Way sky shots (with and without zooms).

The T5i came in a couple of configured bundles, and I went with the one that included two lenses — 18-55mm, and 55-250mm. It also has a whack of pre-set modes:

  • Portrait (blurred backgrounds);
  • Landscape (wide depth of field so both foreground and background are in focus);
  • Close-up (aka a software macro option for flowers and things);
  • Sports (continuous shooting, high speed capture, rapid focus);
  • Scene mode (several sub-options);
  • Creative auto (simple mode for quick setting of common features);
  • Flash off (can’t fire, no matter what the camera thinks is right or not); and,
  • Scene-intelligent auto (the computer takes its best guess on all the settings, useful if you keep changing setting)

It then has four semi-manual modes:

  • Program mode (P) — This is a bit misleading, as it is semi-auto (aperture and shutter speed) but you control the rest;
  • Shutter priority mode (Tv) — You control how fast the shutter is, the computer does the rest;
  • Aperture priority mode (Av) — You control how wide the aperture is, the computer does the rest;
  • Manual mode (M) — The full power of the camera is at your fingertips.

For me, I spend almost all my time in pre-set modes, and truth be told, I don’t even do that well.

I have managed to get what I think are some great shots — birds in flight, cousins doing various water sports, flora around various hiking trails in Ottawa. But while I pointed the camera, chose the mode (sports, for example) and captured the shot (cousin waterskiing and spraying up water), I didn’t really know what the camera was doing. I wanted to know how and why it worked, not just the what of the shot or settings. Part of my reasoning is that if I can understand the basics for my primary needs (basic outdoors and indoors), I have a better shot at understanding how to approach astrophotography.

So I signed up in September for a course with Henry’s, the local photography store. I wanted a bit of hands-on experience to get me out of pre-set modes and into manual, but I also wanted to know what the camera was doing. Part of that experience is going back to look at previous photos that turned out well and figuring out, “OH! So THAT’S how I / my camera did that…”. There were a few options available including both “learn about your Canon camera” as well as “photography 101”. With timing and location, I opted for the photography basics course in Kanata.

The course was divided into four classroom sessions, plus one practical session, with each session designed to dive into the key aspects of what you control in photography. I’m going to write separate blog posts about each week, but the overview is show below, although the titles/descriptions are mine, not the official ones:

  1. Camera fundamentals — I hesitate to call this “meet your camera” but it pretty much is what it was about. You learn all the basic controls, what they do, and because it is a generic photography class with everyone having different brands and models, a lot of it was hands on walking various people through THEIR camera settings to get it into a relatively common set of options for everyone to start with.
  2. Understanding aperture — Looking at depth of field, aperture and f/stops, and fast lenses.
  3. Understanding shutter speed — Looking at motion for capture, blurring, and panning techniques;
  4. Planning the photo — Looking at a combination of different lenses, perspectives, sensors, and then the creative side (composition, tips).

It was an interesting experience. For week 1 and 2, I went to the Kanata course on Wednesday nights, and there were about 10 of us in the class. A wide range of interest — older for hobby, younger with dreams of entrepreneurship, a few unique interests. However, the instructor noted he was also teaching on Friday nights nearer my house (earlier time, and on a Friday?), and if we missed Wed, we could catch Friday at the other site. Week 3 & 4, I did just that, because there was only 1 person over there, meaning it was almost like a hands-on class. We asked questions constantly, at least I did, and stopped him regularly when something wasn’t clear. Way more “aha” moments than if we had been in a larger group because it was the follow-up questions that really crystallized things for me. When I do the four blogs for the weeks, I really want to see if I can re-create some of the examples.

I have the practical session tonight, but it isn’t as “practical” as it sounds — we’ll be over by a park in the relative dark. The Friday night class would be great for me, but it’s at a bad time for me this week. so not sure what I’m doing yet.

Am I ready to go full manual now? No, but I achieved my true goal — learning and feeling much more comfortable with making my camera do more of what I want it to and less of what I don’t. Part of a multi-year plan to get me fully conversant before retirement. And a welcome addition to my list of 50 things.


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

A quick way to understand the basic steps in smartphone astrophotography

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

I’ve posted a few times about my experience with smartphone astrophotography. A person who is active online in this area, Kevin Francis, shared with me a copy of an infographic he did based on his experiences.

You can find the infographic over at:

Smartphone Astrophotography: In 6 Steps [Infographic]

Note that the infographic isn`t meant to give you all the details, but I like his framing:

  1. Choosing your equipment (i.e., pick a smartphone);
  2. Choose a camera app (there are only really two great ones, depends on which OS you`re running);
  3. Use a tripod or mount to make it steady;
  4. Decide if you`re using the phone by itself, marrying it to a lens, or shooting through a telescope;
  5. Capture the image (single shots, long or short exposures, multiple images for stacking, etc.);
  6. Process the images you took.

Is that level of detail going to get you going today? No, but it will tell you the basics you need to know so you can start thinking about what you want to do. Thanks to Kevin for sharing…


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 9 – DSOs through a long exposure in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Earlier I mentioned that when you’re doing your initial camera settings, you could see how good your hardware was by looking at the maximum resolution of long exposures. If it crunches it to a much smaller size than your max resolution for normal shots, you’re kind of hosed for astrophotography. Like me.

But, sure, you can go into program mode. Max out your ISO, boost your duration to 10s or longer (too long and in theory you’ll get star trails), and BAM, a long exposure shot.

Here’s what I get when I set my camera for 10s @ ISO 1600 while looking at M003:

Isn’t that amazing? The depth, the colour, it feels like I could just touch it. A solid black image of nothingness. My sensor will pick up bright single stars (like Spica or something), but it will NOT register a DSO. Most of the time, it won’t even TAKE a picture — it basically gives an error that no picture was recorded. It saw NOTHING, so it took NOTHING. Apparently somewhere in the above there was enough of something for the camera to think there was something there, but nothing visible once processed. It’s also not entirely clear on my old phone if it is doing anything other than simulating a long exposure.

But regardless of what it does or doesn’t do for LEs, it does mean I’m limited to shots of planets or the moon. Maybe some constellations if the individual stars are bright enough. If I want to do more, I need a new camera to work with…


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 8 – Video in Camera FV-5 / Cinema FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

If you don’t have very good control over your manual settings, or you can’t get a lot of images to stack, one solution that a lot of people use is to say “screw it” and just take a video. Usually the power of the camera drops somewhat by going to video, but what you lack in initial power, you make up for when you take a video. For the ISO comparison, I shot the moon. Some of the manual controls in Camera FV-5 were overriding each other, but still, one way around a lot of short burst images is to do a video. Since Camera FV-5 doesn’t support video directly, I used the companion app, Cinema FV-5.

I shot one of the moon for 90s, and then ran it through the PIPP processor plus Auto-Stakkert. Here is the result, compared with the original single shot earlier:

Single shot Video processed and stacked

Obviously, something went wrong in the stacking process somewhere, which is part of the challenge of using videos — you have to convert them essentially into frames and then stack them one on top of another to get an image. More art than science at times, and I didn’t go back to find the problem, partly as I’m lazy and partly as it is a bit overkill for a moon shot when the original has a fair amount of detail. If you want more than that, use a real camera!

I also did one of Jupiter for 80s, same processing:

No better than I had done earlier, although the relatively perfect roundness of the planet hints at the power of stacking if you can capture one in the first place that isn’t washed out.

And one of Spica, a single star, for 10s, same processing:

Not very exciting, but it can be done. Normally it would be done with larger fields, but well, my camera doesn’t do that. This is about the best I can get.


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 7 – ISO control in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

For any good astrophotography, you need to get out of automatic mode and into more granular manual control. On my old camera, I hit a limit even on ISO control and duration of photos, so even showing ISO elements for the moon isn’t quite so obvious. The app compensates to some extent for the duration to still give me a decent shot, so while you don’t necessarily see the images getting completely washed out with ISO settings, you can see that you start to lose detail (as the app compensates) for the mountain range Montes Penninus about halfway up on the left and the crater collection on the bottom.

ISO – Auto

ISO – 100

ISO – 200

ISO – 400

ISO – 800

ISO -1600


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 6 – Intervalometer in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

One nice feature that some people might like in the Camera FV-5 app is a built-in intervalometer. The setting is available from the Shooting Utilities menu on the main screen (looks like a histogram / landscape image of a mountain), and within that menu, is located as the second icon from the right (next to BRK). The symbol looks like the timer icon, but says INT in small letters under it.

The shooting modes available let you choose:

a. Interval + total shots i.e. how often to take a pic and how many photos in total;

b. Interval + shooting duration;

c. Interval+ playback duration i.e. if you turn it into a GIF or video;

d. Shooting + playback duration i.e. if you want to essentially later create slow motion or compressed video;

e. Shooting duration + total number of shots i.e. it will figure out how often to take pics.

For AP, you’re likely to stay in the first one…how far apart to take the shots (likely low number of 1 or 2 seconds) and how many photos in total (100+ is common). Your maximum number of shots is theoretically unlimited (it let me put in 10M shots for instance), but going much above several thousand is going to suck your battery dry and eat up your memory. The interval range is between 1 and 3600 seconds (1s up to 1h).

I ran 100 shots through, but for some reason, the app set my shots on Jupiter at ISO 1000 again, basically guaranteeing overwhelming whiteout of the planet. Stacking that 100 times doesn’t really help with that, just makes it worse in many ways. The app just didn’t give me enough control to bypass that on first go.

Here’s the result, compliments of AutoStakkert:

Nothing special there. But at least Camera FV-5 has the function, something a lot of other apps don’t, and a key tool that most astro photographers need. Saves having to press the button 100 times too. 🙂


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 5 – Colour channels in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Most of the people doing AP tend to say, use the RGB colour channels. Some go hard-core and sample different colour channels separately to give more definition in certain colour ranges, and if you were an expert, you also might want to turn on the visual histogram with each photo. More power to you, if you do.

For me, I am persuaded in part by the idea that shades of gray are not the same as shades of colour, and I would rather have RGB in the mix to make what I get in the image as close as possible to what I see with my eye in some respects. But I thought I would try and see if maybe it would do something on the white balance or other settings. The first is with RGB, the second is “luminance” aka B/W.

RGB Luminance (B/W)

Hard to tell at the washed out levels, but I would tend to go with the first all the time. If you were into the DSLR or high-end webcams, you’d have a more nuanced view, no doubt, but RGB it is for me.


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 4 – White balance in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

There is a lot of conflicting information out there about white balance and what it should be for a setting. Some say set it to daylight mode, as it generally avoids colour challenges where things shift and don’t look right. Makes sense. Another site said however that if I was shooting in an urban setting, I should go for a “colder” setting. I wanted to test it, and the computer over-rode the settings for some reason. My end result looks identical to me:

Supposedly cloudy setting:

Supposedly daylight setting:

Supposedly flourescent / tungsten:

Supposedly incandescent (the coldest setting):

In the end, I can only go by the screen as the outputs don’t tend to help much on this setting. Overall, basically, I would say that the daylight setting is indeed the most realistic. Anything else on the moon either dulled it out (which could be good), or changed the colour (think light blue for tungsten). I just wish I had a better image to show the difference. However, with some of the other limitations, I suspect you may end up using AUTO WB more often than not for within the solar system.


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 3 – Contrast, saturation and sharpness in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

When I left off in the last post, Smartphone astrophotography part 2 – The Android app Camera FV-5, I had narrowed down all the big “camera settings” that could affect my attempts from 23 possibles to only 3 real ones to play with or test — contrast, saturation, and sharpness. When I read a bunch of articles online, such as at Astropix.com, the advice basically said:

  • Set Contrast to “normal” which I took to be medium (i.e. not low or high);
  • Set Saturation to “normal”, again being medium; and
  • Turn Sharpen off and fix in processing because while sharpening is nice, the potential benefit is balanced out by increasing the amount of noise.

Two of my other advisors basically said they never do anything with it in the iPhone app, and the other said he just leaves it medium / normal for all three.

However, since everyone tells me that you have to test it “on your equipment” to see what result you get, I set myself up to do a series of snaps…one with everything turned off, one with contrast at medium or high with everything else turned off, one with saturation at medium or high with everything else turned off, one with sharpness at medium or high with everything else turned off, one with all three at medium/normal, and one with all three at high.

Since I wanted to be able to “see” the difference I was getting, I set up on Jupiter and hoped for the best, while trying to set every other feature to automatic. Somewhat ironic, while I was still setting up, I managed to get a shot of Jupiter before I even got going that had faint bands. As an aside, I should also mention I was doing BRACKETED exposure compensation at the same time. I’ll talk about this in a subsequent post, but it basically is a way to do “BURST” mode while adjusting your exposure slightly. The meter goes from -2 to +2 in .5 increments…for those playing along at home, that means a total of 7 settings for exposure. The default is “0” in the middle. Bracketing allows you to do the standard default in the middle, but before it does, it takes some below (negative compensation) and above (positive compensation). I set it to do the full 3F (three shots) with 2 as the increment i.e. -2, 0, and +2. Basically -2 will dim it, 0 will be normal, and +2 would be brightened (potentially too much). The best one for Jupiter was for Auto with a -2 compensation.

Setup luck

It seemed like auspicious beginnings, I must confess, but those were at ISO100 and 1/30s. At the risk of spoilers, the next session didn’t live up to the opening. My opening base in full size looked like this (with contrast set to minimum, saturation set to minimum, and sharpness set to minimum). One of the sites recommended increasing ISO to about 1000 so you could see changes up and down, but it is more in the end about shades of bright white.

As I mentioned,I wanted to show a base of 0,0,0 (contrast, saturation, sharpness) against medium contrast and full contrast to see what impact the contrast setting would have.

Base Medium Contrast Full Contrast

There isn’t a whole lot of difference in the three other than as you increase the “contrast”, you actually don’t increase contrast “within” the image (i.e. within Jupiter), you just increase the contrast between Jupiter and the background. It basically makes the bright Jupiter go even brighter. And I thus lost the moons in the progressions. So contrast isn’t going to likely help me much, other than by needing to tone it down, not up.

For the saturation, I wanted the same test.

Base Medium Saturation Full Saturation

Now, saturation basically operated the way I expected. The more “saturated” the setting, the more Jupiter was whited out. So it’s not going to help much for already-bright objects, but may hinder somewhat.

For sharpness, same deal as the last two tests.

Base Medium Sharpness Full Sharpness

And yet, I’m not sure WHAT is going on in this one. The moons do seem a bit more pinpoint-like in the last one, but at the expense of definition around the edge of the planet.

End result? Not much difference no matter any of the settings, other than that it generally starts to whiten / overwhelm the image as I go much above the minimum. Admittedly, again, it was going to ISO1000 by default, which tends to overwhelm anyway, but even with the compensation at -2 for all of the above options, it wasn’t enough to make the images worthwhile.

I wasn’t quite done though. I wanted to do balanced settings.

Base All three to medium All three to full

As expected, any setting above “base” tends to just completely white out the entire shot. I tried one of the recommended combos and even the app’s default settings, but all of them overwhelmed the image. Even the last one tended to boost contrast high enough for me to lose the moons.

Base Medium Contrast, Medium Saturation, Full Sharpness App default: Medium Contrast, Medium Saturation, 3/4 Sharpness

I’d love to be able to say, “Hey, now let’s try this with ISO 100” and see what I get, but that wasn’t next on my checklist. In the end, I had three lessons learned:

A. Obviously, ISO1000 will almost always be too high for Jupiter (duh);

B. The contrast, saturation and sharpness can affect the brightness and whiting out of the image, regardless of their intent, and should likely be used exceedingly sparingly for solar system targets;

C. Sharpness had a bigger range, so if I was trying for a DSO where I needed more brightness, I might try shifting an extra 10% sharpness over whatever my saturation and contrast levels were, but for anything else, it’s probably better to just be at minimum.

Ultimately though, it’s easier to just turn all three to minimum and let the other settings control the image settings. Good to know they’re there though if I’m having other over exposure problems.


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share

Smartphone astrophotography part 2 – The Android app Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

One of my goals this year is to take some astro pics of various things – moon, planets, stars, DSOs. And since I have seen people do some amazing things with the same scope as me (NexStar 8SE) and a smartphone, I wanted to try it too. In a previous post, I described it as beginner / entry-level astrophotography (Smartphone astrophotography part 1 – Meade smartphone adapter). I have a Meade adapter to hold the smartphone and some okay eyepieces to use, but getting set up is probably the least of the challenge…while I have managed to get a couple of good shots, I haven’t been very consistent.

I outlined seven steps in my previous post and after fiddling with setups, I managed to mount the phone, adjust the phone to the eyepiece ring, mount the eyepiece, find an object, and adjust the scope’s focus. Five steps down, somewhat mechanical and there’s always likely room for improvement, but it’s good enough for amateur work. Which leaves adjusting the camera settings and snapping the photo or video. If I’m really specific about it, these two actually break into three pieces:

  • Set the general camera settings
  • Set the individual image settings
  • Record the image or video

For iOS phones, you use Night Cap(ture); there are other apps but anyone having any really serious luck with their iPhones and a scope is generally using this app. For Android, the popular choice is Camera FV-5; as with iOS, there are other choices, but most people are defaulting to this app. Both are popular because you can change camera and image settings out the wazoo, which you need in order to get beyond basic settings and into astro-photography configs for low-light.

However, when I looked at the camera settings, I hit a wall. In Camera FV-5, there are *23* settings that could directly impact my type of astrophotos. TWENTY-THREE of them. While the general advice is a bit of trial and error, and making a checklist to run through all the different types of options, 23 is way too many. With all the sub-options, etc., it would be hundreds of permutations. So I needed to triage the list to a more manageable size. I reached out to Lokifish and FlyingSnow on Cloudy Nights, Loren on Cloudy Nights and on FaceBook, and Andrew through Twitter. Most of them are using iPhones, not Android, and different software, but my initial camera questions were a bit more generic than that, not specifically limited to iPhones or Android i.e. not really limited to smartphones. To be honest, I think they are more about astrophotography in general, and in addition to consulting the four people mentioned above, I did a LOT of online searching to find people talking about the same issues. I tried the even tried the RASCAG group too but no nibbles. But with the various avenues, I managed to weed the initial list of 23 down to just 3 to keep for a checklist experiment. If you’re thinking of trying the software, click on the settings icon, and here’s what you will find:

A. Under Basic Settings tab:

  • Irrelevant: Storage location, custom storage folder, and geotagging are more about your own personal interests, not the outputs, and you might as well turn the composition grid off too.
  • Mostly irrelevant: I initially set maximize screen brightness to OFF, mainly as a question around preserving my night vision (there’s a lot of white on the screen and no app-based night mode to turn everything red). However, for some darker sky options, I wanted the screen as bright as possible to show any stray photons. It doesn’t affect the photos, just your viewer, so it’s more personal preference.
  • Relevant: But you SHOULD set Image Resolution to the maximum size you have available as you want as much light and information in the photos as possible. You should also note the maximum size shown as it will be relevant in another section in a minute.

B. Under the General Camera Settings tab:

  • Irrelevant: Set review last photo, review time, sound (3 sub-options), hardware controls (2 sub-options), use double back key press, and prefer external applications to whatever you want to for personal style, as none of them affect the photos. Anti-banding sounds impressive until you actually see the sub-settings — it is basically about Hz ranges, which might sound relevant until you see that there is a setting for Europe and USA. What is it? It’s so you don’t take a pic of a TV screen and see bands on it. I hit disable.
  • Mostly irrelevant: Under “compatibility”, you will see six sub-options that are highly technical and their “grouping” doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. “Keep AE-L/AWB-L after focus and shoots” doesn’t affect photos but it DOES allow you to set them once and keep it set, rather than any resets after each shot. The next three work together — if you use a bracketing procedure (we’ll come to this later but basically it takes three to seven photos at a time, sequentially like a burst, with slightly different exposure compensation), then these three options will affect how well that tool works (i.e. pausing between exposures or not, how long the pause should be, and whether you want it to refocus between shots — generally not for the last one because you’re going to be setting it to infinity later anyway for every shot). You can also set the metadata mode (1,2,3) and while metadata is important when you’re comparing photos, I couldn’t find ANY explanation of what the difference was. “2” seemed to have more info in the file than “1”, but that might have just been coincidence. I set mine to 2. The last sub-option is called “Force usage of legacy camera driver”. I can’t imagine a practical normal reason you would ever want to do that — in almost all cases, older camera drivers are going to have less features and produce worse photos than the current driver. I would make sure it is turned off unless you know a specific reason for your phone’s model in particular that makes you want to switch it. Meanwhile, back under the main settings, there is one called “focus before capturing” but since you’re going to set it later to infinity, it can be switched off. The next option also asks if you can take a photo without focus, which is kind of stupid as it just asked the same question. If I can turn it off, why do I want to ask it again? I switched it on (first one says yes you can take photo, second one says actually take the photo?).
  • Relevant: The first sub-option under main heading is the only real one that is relevant, and not for the reason that first appears. It is called “Long Exposure Resolution”. Like with Basic Settings / Image Resolution, this is asking you what resolution you should use. Again, for astro photos, you generally want the biggest one you can get with the most detail. So while that seems like a no-brainer, I’m flagging it for another reason. On my phone, my Max Image Resolution is 12MP (chosen in the section above), but my max Long Exposure Resolution is…wait for it…2MP. Why? Because my phone’s camera sucks. I’m using a Galaxy Note 3 that works great for just about everything else but the sensor is so old, it’s going to drastically limit me for certain types of astro photos. It also means that although the software may SAY it’s doing a long 20s exposure, it looks like that is more of a “simulated” long exposure (taking smaller shorter exposures and stacking them together). I’ll cover this in more detail with my actual image reviews, but you should know right up front, if this says you’re limited to a much smaller size, it means your expectations for pics of anything outside our solar system should be limited.

C. Under the Photo Encoding Settings tab:

  • Irrelevant: Photo storage and numbering (four options) are irrelevant to the image, just personal preference.
  • Mostly irrelevant: Choosing to embed the thumbnail in the JPG doesn’t affect your image quality, but you may want it when reviewing and sorting photos later. I switched it off, but my consultative advisors recommended leaving it on. And you might as well have best quality (100) for the thumbnail. Similarly, picture orientation (2 options, both of which I leave off) and MetaData (I include EXIF +XMP) are just personal preference.
  • Relevant: There are four relevant ones left, but two of them are intertwined and obvious. The first one is the file format — on almost all Android phones, this is going to be JPG or PNG. I prefer JPG, doesn’t really matter. What matters is if you have a third option to do RAW. If you do, I am highly jealous. The RAW format is your gold standard and what most hard-core astro-photographers use for imaging. Just like most any other serious photographer for other subjects. But you likely won’t have the option, so choices after that are pretty obvious. If you choose JPG, you will want the highest quality level (again, why not?). The setting, “SET IMAGE PARAMETERS” (for contrast, saturation and sharpness), is actually highly-relevant, and while you only set it once generally, I’m going to cover it in the next post with the image checklist options. Finally, the setting for “COLOR CHANNELS” isn’t as exciting as some astrophotographers might hope. Often, APers, will take shots with Reds, Greens, and Blues separately (no, I don’t know hardly anything about it) to capture different light spectrums and then merge them later. It gives them more granularity of control in the final combined photos. However, this one only has two options — RGB i.e. in colour or Luminance i.e. B/W. While B/W might be tempting, people tend to get more realistic photos in colour.

D. Under the Viewfinder Settings tab:

  • Irrelevant: This whole section is relatively irrelevant for the images, just your own preferences in working the screen. Widescreen is preferred by some, I tend to leave it off; I check the “DO NOT TURN SCREEN OFF” because it’s annoying in the middle of setting up and checking some info in a book or something to have the phone turn off, reenter the pass code, get it back to where you were. Of course, leaving it on sucks battery life. Since I don’t do image rotation either, I leave the viewfinder in landscape mode on mine.
  • Mostly irrelevant: Under Viewfinder Overlaps, there are two options that are useful — SHOW STOPS DISPLAY (i.e. exposure compensation) and SHOW CAMERA PARAMETERS (i.e. show your settings on the screen before you snap). Focus Assist sounds like it could be relevant, except you’re not manually focusing with the camera, you’re doing it with the scope. Your phone is set to Infinity.
  • Relevant: The Histogram settings could be useful, I have no idea how to use them though, so I don’t bother. If you can get a good image of something on your screen, reviewing the histogram would let you tweak it even more, but that is beyond my ken.

And that’s it. All the main options eliminated or set, twenty relevant ones addressed, and only three that carry forward to my next post of testing different things with a checklist approach.


Print pagePDF pageEmail page
Share