Expert night sky photographer Ian Norman has created an easy-to-follow video guide on how to photograph and process images of the beautiful constellation Orion. Starting tonight using any camera and a standard prime lens, you too can get amazing results by following this tutorial.
According to Norman, Orion is an excellent constellation to photograph this time of year. It is visible to most of the world from October to May, and it contains interesting, bright nebulas along with some of the night’s brightest stars.
What’s great about Orion is that you can create wonderful images using just a standard focal length prime lens (something around 50mm) mounted to any camera. Norman recommends the lens have a aperture number of f/2.0 or lower so that it can capture more light in a shorter amount of time. For the images used in his tutorial for example, Norman is using a Sony a7S camera, a Sony 55mm f/1.8 lens, and the Sirui T–025X travel tripod to keep things steady for these long-exposure photographs. The video includes a handy starter guide to the settings you may want to try first and adjust from there.
Norman's recommended focal lengths and exposure settings.
For this exercise, Norman suggests shooting a minimum of 32 exposures that will be blended together using Lightroom and Photoshop. The post-processing portion of this tutorial begins in Lightroom where the 32 different exposures have their white balance and vignetting fixed by using some neat tricks that Norman goes over. From Lightroom, the images are merged and sent over to Photoshop where he begins to perform LRGB (Luminosity, Red, Green, Blue) processing. The purpose of editing night sky images in this way is it allows you to create a high contrast luminance layer to bring out detail you didn’t even know existed, and then merge it with RGB color layers to create a stunning final image.
From the before and after images shown above, you can see the dramatic effect Norman’s process is able to bring out in the photo. More information on photographing Orion is available in this full article which accompanies the video tutorial.
If you’d like to learn more about night sky photography, I recommend checking out Norman’s Lonely Speck website which contains an abundant amount of information to set you in the right direction.
