this week I'm gonna go and shoot the stars with four different cameras one is
a point-and-shoot one is a bridge camera one is a micro four-thirds and one is a
full-frame sensor I'm just wondering how much difference
the big sensor will actually make when shooting the Stars I'll keep the 25
millimeter on the sony a7r on the gh4 i have the 12 to 35 2.8 so I'll keep that
at 12 then with the other two cameras they don't have removable lenses so I'll
just shoot as wide as possible so it's a new moon last night I knew the Milky Way
would be out between three o'clock and five o'clock in the morning so I headed
out to a relatively dark place to see if I could see the Milky Way normally I'd
only shoot with one camera I found in shooting with four different cameras the
two hours went really quickly so I didn't get a brilliant shot but I got a
shot of the stars with each of the cameras so I've put all of the images
onto my computer so let's have a look to see what we've got
I haven't processed these at all so these are pretty much straight out of
the camera I did tweak the exposure a little bit on a few to try and get the
exposure exactly the same on each one of them a surprising thing I found was
every one of the cameras did really well normally with this shot I would have
used a little bit of light on the tree to make it stand out a bit more but what
I found was each of the cameras really did pick up the Milky Way and I was
really surprised about this I kept them all to around about 13 to 15 seconds so
the stars wouldn't streak and I kept the ISO as low as I could one thing that
really surprised me was how well the rx10 and the rx100 did they both shoot
in RAW so they did capture a lot of detail the gh4 has a micro 4/3 sensor so
the sensor is slightly bigger again I was surprised at how well the gh4 did
with the rx100 it was very tricky to get the focus right I literally had to take
a shot change the focus slightly take another shot change the focus slightly
and keep doing this so this is the tricky thing with the cheaper cameras
this was the same issue with the RX 10 again with this it was really tricky to
focus and this is why I always say to buy a manual lens the Sam Yang's that I
use a fully manual so I know exactly where the infinity point is with the a7r
Mark - and the batiste 25 millimeter even though it's still focused by wire
on the LCD screen when you have it in manual focus it tells you exactly where
it's focusing - so I'll say how many meters it's focusing to or whether it's
hitting infinity now what I'm going to do is edit these images and see how they
stand up they're all roar images so they should cope with the editing process
quite well
I did a really rough quick edit on the photos but very quickly the Sony a7r
really stood out and I was able to push and pull the image a lot more than
others that spend a lot more time editing my photos normally but I'm just
doing this to show you what the difference is so now if we look at the
gh4 we can see even though I've put a lot of noise reduction Pawnee is still
quite a lot of noise in the image it's quite a dark image and I found it really
hard to bring up the shadows but the main thing is the stars the stars are
really good so it's just a case of coping with the darker patches so if we
move on to the rx100 again you can see this is quite grainy with these high
ISOs you're gonna get grain in your image and if you zoom in one to one
you'll really see this grain now if we switch across to the a7r you can really
see the difference it's a lot brighter and a lot cleaner again if we zoom in
there is noise there but if we look at the detail in the stars you can see got
a really nice Milky Way with the smaller sets of cameras you can see the image is
a little bit mushy it starts to break up at these higher high ISOs and that's
where the a7r and say the a7 s are really good so another thing if we look
down here at the tree we can see the detail with the a7r Mark 2 compared to
the RX 10 so I think on the far x10 the focusing was a little bit out and this
comes back to the problem I was having with focusing the cameras in such low
light if you've got a manual lens or if you have a lens that let you make my
neat adjustment like the batis this is when you can get your focus spot on with
the rx100 surprisingly this did well and I've got the focus again with a GH for
the focus was alright but it does seem to struggle in low-light now I know this
really isn't a fair comparison but I wanted to see how the smaller
sense of cameras coped in the low-light basically I'm looking for a cheap
astrophotography package that I can show you guys so then you can get out there
and shoot the stars and shoot the Milky Way even though the a7r does stand out
and I've been ripping the other cameras images a little bit I
was pleasantly surprised by the quality that they give I know now that if I just
had a gh4 or even if I just had an rx 100 I could
still safely go out and take some pictures of the stars and that's about
it I hope I've shown you that you don't need an expensive camera to take a photo
of the stars you just need to know your camera the settings on your camera and
what settings to use to get cured photos so now you've got no excuses
the next clear night find a safe spot set your camera on a tripod and take
some photos of the stars if you're not sure how to do it click on the link in
the corner this will take you to my Astro photography video as always if you
like what you see you give me a thumbs up if you don't give me a thumbs down
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