Today I'm going to test out a light pollution filter for astrophotography
and see if it's any good
the company free well sent me a light pollution filter last autumn but I
wanted to wait until the Milky Way season to get a few different shots with
it now I'm a wide field astrophotographer I don't have a
telescope and even though I've done some deep space objects I mostly go for wide
field Milky Way shots now just before we were stopped from going out and we got
grounded the Milky Way started and I managed to get to a portal three
location we did have some small villages to the south which put a little bit of
light pollution on the horizon and then to the north
Abid abbey glowed in the distance so I tried a few different test shots to see
what this light pollution filter acted like at 129 99 it is one of free Wells
more expensive filters but is it worth it or not that's the question I want to
answer today it is part of their magnetic range so once you have the
adapter on your lenses it's just a case of clicking them into place which i
think is fantastic I already have nd filters circular polarizers and things
like that and they just click into place and it is a really good system I know
some of the other brands do this magnetic system as well so it's well
worth getting if you get frustrated with just screwing your filters on and off
the first thing to note is that it has a very blue tint when I shoot
astrophotography I tend to set my white balance to tungsten I just like this as
a starting point and as I shoot in RAW it doesn't really matter I just don't
like seeing the overly yellow shots on the back of my camera when the white
balance is set to the daylight setting tungsten just makes it look to me almost
like it does in real life but just maybe a little bit bluer so because of this
when I put this filter on it did make my photos look so much more bluer than
normal looking at the unedited RAW files side by side the one with the filter is
the one that's so much bluer and it really does make the shot a lot
different also it has dropped the amount of light coming into the camera by
around about half a stop as for the light pollution side by side unedited it
does look like it is controlled it a little bit
but is this just to do with that drop in light coming into the camera or is it
actually helping first off let's have a look at these two
shots this is looking east from the location ours at and there are a couple
of different compounds just past the horizon we also have a phone mast in the
shot so as you can see we have a mix of light pollution when editing these I'll
first start with the one without the filter and make the changes I'd normally
make it's not an overly exciting shot but a good one for comparing these
filters so once I've edited the shot to where I want it I'll just sync these
settings now just in doing this that blueness really shows so syncing isn't
really an option so I'll undo that and then edit it from
scratch the first thing to do is get rid of all of that blue color and then I'll
edit it as normal trying to make the stars pop out of the
sky now what I've done is edited them as close as possible to each other and
those sources of light pollution on the horizon really don't look that
difference at all if anything as I started from a much
bluer base file and pushing the white balance slider to the right a lot more
it has emphasized the orange glow to the right a bit more than without the filter
but it's hard to tell the difference apart from this these next two you have
a lot more light pollution in them this is looking Southwest towards a closer
village with a very distinct orange glow you can also see Orion just above and to
the right of the village this would always be a tricky one to edit with all
of this light pollution and it almost looks like the Sun is starting to break
the horizon but as any of you that have been out shooting the stars before will
know when the Sun does start rising the stars will have disappeared well before
this point again with these two once edited I've got them as close as
possible due to the blue tone on the filter when moving the white balance
slider to the right this again emphasized that orange glow on the
horizon however the globe does look slightly less prominent in the one with
that filter so in this case it is helping a little bit after this I waited
for the Milky Way to rise and then tried out the filter again but this time I did
what I'd normally in taking a photograph of the Milky Way
and that is put some of the landscape in front of the worst parts of the light
pollution and in this case at this location surprise surprise it was a San
Jim and this is a good little trick to do if you do have a lot of light
pollution on the horizon look for a dip in the landscape where you can get much
lower and then there's a bit of the landscape that comes a bit higher and
then hide as much of that light pollution as possible with that
foreground cities and villages can be hundreds of kilometres away but with the
long exposures used in astrophotography they do still show up even though they
might only be a faint glow on that horizon so do be aware of this I also
had to snap two shots for these as the foreground was out of focus when the sky
was in focus and vice-versa so I've literally blended two shots
together one of the land and one of the skies so everything is in focus
on the foreground I also did some light painting shining my phone on the
foreground from the left for a few seconds once again I edited the one
without the filter as normal balancing the colors to my liking making the Milky
Way and stars pop and then bringing out the foreground as much as possible once
I got it to a point where I liked it I tried synching it once again but that
blue cast with the one with the filter on really did sharp again so I edited it
from scratch if I switch between these two shots you can see how different the
settings are on my basic sliders especially the white balance slider look
how far right I had to pull the temperature slider
this shows how blue the filter actually is but the question is did it help from
my experience with this filter the blue cars didn't worry me too much as I shoot
in RAW and if you're an astro photographer you really should be
shooting in RAW but if you do shoot JPEGs you really would have to get your
white balance right before using this filter and this might be quite tricky in
such dark conditions the one thing that did make a difference is that drop in
light it seems to be about half a stop which when doing a 30 second exposure
would mean adding 15 seconds more or with ISO adding a thousand or so more to
your Lev or using a faster lens and at night as
there is so little light about in the first place this drop of half a stop
isn't brilliant so will I be using this in the future to put it bluntly probably
not the best thing you can do to get good astrophotography photographs is to
get to a good dark location away from any cities or any big sources of light
and if you are thinking of getting one of these to lessen the amount of
traveling time that you'd have to do to get to one of these locations don't I'd
advise spending the money on fuel to get to a better location instead of buying
one of these filters the benefits I got from this filter were so small if any
that I don't think it's really worth it I wish it did work because being able to
cut out light pollution and still get the stars and still get the Milky Way
would be fantastic but in reality when you do cut out that light pollution
you'll also cut out all other forms of light as well including what you want to
photograph now what do you think do you use a light pollution filter and have
you been able to get better results than me let me know in the comments below now
if you like this and want to learn more about Astro photography click on this
video to learn about how to shoot the stars with a crop sensor camera and this
one down here to learn how to shoot the stars with a full-frame camera and if
you haven't already be sure to subscribe for weekly tutorials in photography I'll
see you next time