Star Trails Nikon F60 28-80mm?
I have a Nikon F60 (N60 in US) and a 28-80mm lens and I'm just wondering if what I have will meet the requirements of taking good photos of star trails.
Nikon F60
35mm film (ISO of 200)
Apertures:
For half an hour- f8
For 1 hour- f11
For 1 and a half hours- f13
For 2 hours- f16
I may also do a fifteen minute exposure at f5.6 - though will that let way too much light in?
The exposure will be set to Long Time Exposure, so it the shutter will remain open until I press the shutter-release button again.
I won't do more than two hour sets because I've heard that if the aperture number goes much higher than 16 the photos become blurry?
Is all of that okay?
Any help much appreciated! Xxx
Hi
Looking at your kit specs and what have you, I'd say that you've got a good camera that should work for you in capturing the images you are looking to get. A couple of things immediately jump out at me though.
You're talking about a minimum exposure time of 30 mins with an ISO200 film. Ok, at F8 but still 30 mins strikes me as a pretty long exposure for that film. To get a star trail, I think you'd need a longer exposure to be honest. My experience was with a compact 35mm camera using an ISO400 film. I wanted to capture just a star field, nothing to exciting. Pointing the camera skywards (on a tripod of course), I set the camera to infinity focus, aperture at F4 if I remember correctly, and then attached a cable release. Pressed the button and then went and had a warm drink for 10 mins. When the exposures (I bracketed by a F-stop each way and with an exposure time of 15 mins as well so 6 exposures in total) came back, the shorter exposure images were the better of the set but they all suffered from a lot of light-pollution. I had plane trails, I had light pollution, I had a blurry smudge which we think might have been a bat and one or two faint white dots which were the stars. Moral of my story - I would consider using an ISO100 or even 50 film for the exposure time and image quality as much as anything else.
With your kit and suggested exposures I think you may well get some really good images, but do make sure that you are in what astronomers call a "deep sky spot" with minimum or no street lighting and do bracket! I know that film processing is very expensive so it would be a shame to waste the effort and pennies.
Enjoy and I hope you post some of your photos to a flicr account as I'd be interested to see how they come out.
It's actually very much dependent on the specific film that you use. Each film behaves differently and has a slightly different breakdown of reciprocity, and colour shift. Trouble is not all films come with the data of reciprocity breakdown. You need to pick the right film for the job by carefully looking at the datasheets for the film. Sometimes you will have to burn a few rolls to test the film's exposure.
You are right that beyond f/16 you lose sharpness. However because of reciprocity breakdown it's unlikely that you ever will need to stop down that far.
This is an example of a datasheet for ilford FP4 plus.http://ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/2010712125850702.pdf this is the type of information you will need to look up. Be warned a number of colour films don't have this data because they were not designed to be shot at exposures of longer than around 1/2 second.