Last night I was supposed to head down to the beach and photograph the meteor showers that were happening.
I opted to use the X-T2, with the 16mm 1.4. In previous attempts at shooting meteors and stars I used my Zeiss 12mm F2.8 Touit but I found the chroma was too much for me.
At the end of the day I decided not to drive an hour, but to go out on my back deck and play with the X-T2. I setup the camera on a tripod with the 16 1.4. I made the focus point to the second smallest square; opened the lens wide to 1.4 and pressed my back-button focus. What surprised the heck out of me, and I mean very pleasantly surprised, was the fact the 16 1.4 actually focused on a distant star THE FIRST TIME. No hunting, nothing. I was so surprised, that I decided to re-focus again. Same thing. Perfect focus the first time! Damn!
I turned off Auto focus – moving the button on the front of the camera to M; Turned off Long Exposure Noise reduction, put the camera in .raf only. I turned the white balance to incandescent mode, I put the camera on “T” mode and made a test exposure of 50 seconds, at F2. That’s all I needed — one exposure.
With a fresh battery I set the intervalometer to 200 images at 1 second interval; started the first image and went back in the house.
I checked on the camera a few times and since all was well I left everything alone until the battery died at 196 images. I left the rear LCD image on which killed the battery a bit quicker than I wanted. I’ll need to shut that off for next time!
Once I had all the images in LR, I did some minor editing then used Photoshop to create the time-lapse. With the same images I used the free software Starstax to create one image out of the 190+ images. I caught too many aircraft flying by but they don’t bother me so I left them in.
Here is the still life as my version of wordpress won’t allow a video….
Enjoy
Adventures with the Fuji X System 