If you want to make your landscape photos stand out, one technique is to shoot against a beautiful night sky. After all, who doesn’t love combining landscapes and astrophotography? If you’re familiar with night sky photography, you must know how challenging it can be to make the stars stand out. All of them appear similar in the final image, and it takes a lot of effort in post to make the magic happen. In today’s video, landscape photographer Mads Peter Iversen demonstrates how you can easily overcome this challenge. He uses the Starglow filter from Kase and shows how convenient it is to enhance star photographs directly in-camera:
Iversen uses the Starglow filter with his Sony A7RIII camera and a 24-105 mm f/4 lens. He also uses a star tracker to take long exposures of the Orion constellation. Since star trackers make the foreground blurry, he also photographs the landscape without the filter or star tracker. This allows him to easily blend the images together in post. He also sets his camera to intervalometer mode to take the photos, which gives him time to run up the hill and pose for his own photo.
In the video, you can see how the Starglow filter makes brighter stars pop out and fades dimmer stars and makes the overall image appear out of focus. The filter also emphasizes the colors of the stars more. Toward the end of the video, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the images taken with and without the filter. As you can tell, the difference is massive. Kase seems to have done a really great job with the Starglow filter.
Will you be trying out the filter for yourself?
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Re the comment from Burt, I think he is getting confused with a Light Pollution filter, that is different than the Alyn Wallace Starglow filter that Mads is using.
If you want to know more about the Starglow filter go here
https://kasefilters.com/product/kase-wolverine-starglow-100mm-alyn-wallace-special-edition
The StarFilter filter is actually a notch filter, based on the technique of a welder’s goggles. It filters out the part of the spectrum that sodium lamps generate. The idea is to filter out city light, since most cities are still being lit with sodium lamps. As cities switch to LED lighting, or if you are in a dark area away from any city (harder and harder to find those…), then this filter has less use.
I was surprised at the explanation given for what the filter does, as it does not mention anything about city light at all, which is actually all it does… The with/without images show that pretty clearly. The “no filter” shows the glow of a nearby city, which is what destroys the contrast of the sky. The “with filter” is just removing that part of the spectrum.