How to Correctly Expose the Foreground at Night (Avoiding Noise!)

Need help when taking nighttime or daytime long exposures? Comment below! 👉 To Download our Free Long Exposure Photography guide: www.photopills.com/articles/long-exposure-photogra…

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I don't like it when people are know-it-alls in comments, so don't take this as a correction, but rather an addendum. Y'all certainly have more experience with this than I do. I have used all of the methods you mentioned and they all have their uses, but I also use one more. I shoot multiple longer exposures at high ISO and median average them to reduce noise. This is particularly useful because it reduces the time invested into any single exposure. Here's an example. Let's use your example of a good foreground test exposure at 4 sec, ISO 10,000. I could shoot the foreground for 6:40 at ISO 100 but what happens if a car drives by, a plane flies over, or a moth lands on the lens? I have to take that 6:40 shot all over again. Instead, I could shoot 0:30 at ISO 6400 for 13-14 exposures and median average them. If one has an error, then I can exclude it and still have a pretty good result without having to shoot the entire sequence again. In practice, I do this usually with only several (3-5) at high ISO for time savings and the results end up fairly clean. My typical foreground shots here in a Bortle 3-4 sky with some ambient light are for 30-60 sec. Also, I understand that there are dynamic range, color, and other issues with high ISO, but that's a smaller issue than noise and can be ameliorated by shooting at lower ISO on an invariant camera (mine works great at 640). Anyway, great video again. This is just another tool to add to the toolbox with the methods that you mentioned earlier.

Excellent info as usual. Thanks much.

Excellent info Rafael, helpful as always!

Just came to comment and like to support you Rafael, would love to have the time to actually see the video. Stay strong my dude!

Brilliant! That was very helpful and sure beats my trial and error approach!

Great video. Super informative. Excellent guide. Thank you!!

Solid advice. Only note from my experience is to err on the side of a possibly just short exposure if it means that many more shots can be taken. Frame averaging helps almost all shots if conditions permit.

Great information Rafael, can’t wait to try it out on my Astro shots. Mind you I’ll have to wait for the clouds to clear here in the west of Ireland though ☹

Brilliant info, thanks very much.

Thank you! I've been guessing!

Many Thanks!!!! Much videos like this!

Superb. Thank you.

@photopills Great video, I do have a few questions: 1) if you shoot for appropriate foreground exposure, will the sky portion of your photo be overexposed - perhaps due to clouds and or stars? 2) Do you just do your test on the foreground, or on the scene as a whole? 3) If you do shoot separate photos for foreground and sky, do you use photoshop or another program to make your composite shots?

Nice one - thanks

Thank u Rafael

awesome video, I really enjoy using photocells and this opens my eyes for creativity even more. One question though, how can I combat blurry vegetation and trees when taking these long exposures. Should I focus stack with shorter exposures then stack the photos together? Thankyou :)

An alternative is to shoot a lots of images (at least 50) with the same settings you would use for the sky (eg. 15" ISO 6400 f:3.5) and stack them using Photoshop > open as layers > Convert to Smart object > Stack Mode > Median. The resulting image has the same exposure but you can open the shadows and push the exposure with almost no noise. Then you can use 20 to 25 of you frames to stack for the sky with StarryLandscapeStacker or Sequator and blend the 2 stacks. If you're interested I've made a tutorial on this technique (in french but you can use automatic subtitles) here: https://youtu.be/PsHMfhQ3uqU

Excellent information, Rafael, but I appreciate it if you record an actual practice in the landscape to demonstrate the setting. I find it confusing to do test settings and calculate equivalent settings afterwards. What about the sky (background) setting? Regards Mohammed