f1.6, iso3200, 15 seconds with Canon 5D Mark 3 & 24mm f1.4 II
Some of you might know that every August the earth passes through the trail of a comet and we experience a meteor shower know as Perseids. This image of a meteor streaking through the sky was shot during an August Perseid storm and with the help of a little luck, I really like how it turned out.
Whenever you’re shooting the night sky, you need to find something else to include in the shot to help ground the whole scene and give things some scale. This can be something in the near foreground like the trees in this shot, or it can be something like a mountain or ridge line in what I would call the far foreground. Technically even a far away mountain is still the foreground when compared to the sky!
On a dark night with little to no moonlight, the foreground will be darker than the sky and create a nice contrasting silhouette in the shot. As always, contrast like this is an important and strong compositional element. In addition to finding some trees for this purpose, I also looked for a specific shape of tree cluster, and adjusted my camera angle to achieve this triangular pattern which appears to point towards the sky and deliver a nice implied leading line towards where my subject would hopefully appear.
Here’s where I needed a little luck… The camera was set on a tripod with a cable release attached and engaged. This meant that the camera would simply take repeating 15 second exposure. Since one shot started as soon as the previous one finished, I was guaranteed to capture the meteor as long as it went through my frame. The luck really comes in where the meteor crosses the frame, though. Had it been placed too close to the top, or even exiting the frame, the photo would be garbage.
In the end, I caught many meteors, but only one of them fell compositionally in the right spot. That’s fine, I only needed one 🙂 It would also have worked pretty well if it had been slightly higher in the image, but here it landed equidistant between the trees and the visible band of the milky way. I like the balance.
I kept the ISO high to keep the exposure time low and avoid any star trails.  If you’re unsure about that, I’ve previously written a tutorial on Shutter Muse about how to avoid star trails. This is where the awesome Canon 24mm f1.4 II comes in, and the decent high ISO quality of the 5D Mark III. Minimal noise reduction in Lightroom cleaned this up to near perfection. In all I spent about ten hours under the stars over two nights and it yielded probably three images that I’m really pleased with.
Equipment Used for This Shot
- Canon 5D Mark III
- Canon 24mm f/1.4 L II
- Adobe Lightroom CC
- Really Right Stuff TQC-14 Tripod
Once again Dan, loved it. Making me wonder if I should be looking at the 24L instead of 16-35 or 24-70….. thoughts?
Also been shooting with the 300 2.8 IS II and loving it. Have been using the 1.4TC mk III with it and the combo works so well that I’m considering getting the 2.0TC mk III as well. Have you had any experience with that last combo? If so what did you think?
I think the flexibility of the zooms is initially more important but after that I believe the Canon 24mm f1.4 II is one of their all time best lenses. It’s hard to just get the 24, you really then need a 50mm to go with it to fill the gap up to the 70-200.
As for the 2x III , I own one actually and I use it on my 300mm sometimes. I also own the 1.4x III. It produces a useable image if you stop down to f11 but to be honest, the main area of trouble is the AF speed decrease.
I would say that if you only want to get to 600mm occasionally then by all means get one, just don’t go thinking that it’s a definitive alternative to a 500mm or a 600mm.
Hi Dan,
As you say “Minimal noise reduction in Lightroom 4 cleaned this up to near perfection”
That means you just don’t use the 5D mk3 noise reduction option?
It’s not really worth it?
Thanks.
This is a good question.
No in this instance I did not use the in camera long exposure noise reduction. It is not something I have ever tried using and actually when I got home from shooting this I really wish I had tried it out. So I can’t speak for whether that would be a better way to do it but I can say that the results are perfectly acceptable like this anyway. Next time I will compare the on board noise reduction.
thanks,
Dan
That happened to me last time I was out at night shooting at high ISOs, that’s why I asked.
I’ll do my own tests too but definitely looking forward your own experiences and thoughts.
Cheers.