Red indicator light ruined long exposure

COBlackDog

New member
Hi,
I went backing in the mountains and wanted to take extended exposure shots to see if I could get some good pictures of the Milky Way. I realized that there was some red indicator light ruined the long exposure...I tried to cover up the light and some of the images are better, but in all of the pictures have red light on the right side of the picture. I'm not even sure what light it is. How can I turn this off so that next time my star pictures turn out better?
The first image I inserted shows the redish tint and in the 2nd one I was able to crop out most of the red to make a pretty decent pic.
nOAzOKV
Dpg7TSl


And if anyone general tips on taking pictures of stars/Milky Way that would super helpful.

Thanks,
Red Light.jpgMilky Way.jpg
 
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First off welcome to the forum,

A lot of what you are seeing is the color Temp settings. I do not remember right off but I do remember that the last time I shot night skies I changed the color temp and it made all the difference in the world.
 

Moab Man

Senior Member
First off welcome to the forum,

A lot of what you are seeing is the color Temp settings. I do not remember right off but I do remember that the last time I shot night skies I changed the color temp and it made all the difference in the world.

3800 Kelvin is a great place to start.
 

Moab Man

Senior Member
"I realized that there was some red indicator light ruined the long exposure...I tried to cover up the light and some of the images are better, but in all of the pictures have red light on the right side of the picture. I'm not even sure what light it is."

Using a phone or another camera, take a picture and show us what this light is you're referring to.


 
3800 Kelvin is a great place to start.


I always though that white balancing it in Lightroom or ACR would do the trick but a local friend convinced me to try (it might have been 3800K) when shooting. I had shot several in Auto White Balance already and then changed over to 3800K and shot the rest. The one on 3800K were much better than I could get trying to balance the color myself in Lightroom.

Going to have to go look up those photos to see what white balance I did actually use.
 

Scott Murray

Senior Member
It is most likely light coming in through your view finder, did you cover this up? Did you use a red headlamp for looking at the rear of your camera? Were there others around using red tinted head lamps? Always remember to cover your view finder window as it leaks light badly on long exposure night photos.
 

WayneF

Senior Member
Hi,
I went backing in the mountains and wanted to take extended exposure shots to see if I could get some good pictures of the Milky Way. I realized that there was some red indicator light ruined the long exposure...

On the tripod, turn VR off. The pictures are not the same, but here is my picture of VR on a long exposure at night.

800_2084.jpg


This was a D800 with 70-200mm lens, at 200 mm. This was unfortunately 100% repeatable every time, no matter where the camera was aimed.

So turn VR Off on the tripod at night.

FWIW, I just did a calculator the computes the maximum time for such a Milky Way picture on a fixed mount (like the 500 Rule. but much more). It computes the blur trail in terms of multiples of CoC to better judge the effect, and it computes the number of pixels of blur too.

https://scantips.com/lights/stars.html

I am a little curious if I explained the crop factor effect, or if I just totally confused the crop issue.
 
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