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Best settings for Laser Pictures using a DSLR

WackBag

WackBag

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Is there a Digital SLR camera expert out there that knows what the best settings would be for taking pictures of green laser beams? For example, to take an indoor picture of the beam without using smoke (lights out)? Outdoors at night? I have a Nikon D90 DSLR, I am hoping someone out there can recommend settings for the ISO, Shutter Speed, Aperture, etc. This camera takes amazing pictures but I haven't quite figured out the trick for capturing the laser beam best. Thanks in advance...
 





Hrm.  Good question.  What's your F Stop and aperture settings?

I might be talking out my butt on this one but i'll give it a try.

- Set your camera to Shutter Priority (S)
- Setup your tripod and angle you want.
- Set your ISO to the lowest setting, might go as low as 100
- Then try taking the picture at 10, 15 and 30 seconds.  

On of those has got to look goo.

But like I said, i just have an Olympus hand held with pre-set setting (none of witch are marked for lasers  :()
 
Set up on a tripod. You will need to be in M mode. Set lens wide open (smallest f-stop number), try an exposure time of 5 seconds. If the beam seems too bright in the photo, try less time, if beam seems too dark try more time. If having the lens wide open does not provide enough depth of field you will need to stop down a little bit and increase exposure time to compensate. A little experimenting along these lines should get you going. White balance can be an issue, you may need to try some of the manual presets if auto WB doesn't give a good result. You may also need to use a higher ISO setting.
 
I wouldn't say im an expert but I know a fair deal about it.

The higher the aperture setting the darker the picture will be, to compensate for that turn up the exposure. Off the top of my head I would say have the aperture at F9.5 and about 7 seconds of exposure.

Because the aperture is so high it will only see the brightest objects, in this case if the room is pitch black, all it will see is the laser beam. The exposure will let more light in which will make the beam appear brighter whiled keeping everything else black.

Because the picture will be so dark you might get a noisy picture so I would turn up the ISO as well.

In the end its all trial and error now you have the pointers really.
 
I learn that its good to use MANUAL FOCUS instead of auto focus.

Set up a sharp image with additional light on.
Then exposure with roomlight off.

Normally i start with 5 seconds at least, in auto aperture mode. (canon 350D)
In every setup i change the settings, may start with 5 seconds go to 8, 10, 12....30...
Tripod use is in every case required.

And trytrytry  it cost nothing today with these fine dslr cameras.


Daniel
 
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