All kinds of photography - UV included

[Herra Kuulapaa]

Greetings!

 

Found this forum couple of days ago while stepped into UV photography world. It's some really impressive imaging you have done in UV :)

 

I have specialized in monochrome DSLR modifications and imaging with them; Narrow band astrophotography, NIR and now the UVA.

 

http://www.kuulapaa.com/D600/NGC1499_BB.jpg

California Nebula NGC1499 taken with monochrome Nikon D800am/D600am cameras and 656nm Hydrogen alpha filter.

[Andy Perrin]

That's an amazing image! How do you keep everything sharp, especially under high magnification and a narrow band filter, with the Earth rotating? Is your camera moving also?

[colinbm]

Beautiful image Herra, keep them coming.

Col

[toe.freeman]

great

:excl:

—

[Herra Kuulapaa]

That's an amazing image! How do you keep everything sharp, especially under high magnification and a narrow band filter, with the Earth rotating? Is your camera moving also?

 

The astrophotography and especially with long exposure narrow bands is a quite specific form of photography. Imaging setup doesn't only need to compensate the earth rotation, but keep the target stable on sensor on pixel level during the hours long imaging sessions. This can be difficult with long focal lengths when wind is blowing, ground is vibrating etc. The image above was exposed for several hours in 10min parts.

 

The most interesting thing isn't the photography itself though, but how to increase a narrow band signal of DSLR and especially at 656nm, which is normally very limited due to the IR filtering. First step is of course the removal of the sensor filters, but still we have red pixels only 25% of total amount. So, also removal of the RGB bayer matrix makes the total response jump onto a whole another level. This is the trick in DSLR H-alpha imaging and I believe it improves also in UV one.

 

http://www.kuulapaa.com/D800/Sample_2.jpg

[Andrea B.]

Hello Herra and welcome to UVP. Your astrophotographs are beautiful.

 

....and I believe it improves also in UV one.

Yes, removing the Bayer filter also increases the UV sensor response. Our US converter MaxMax.com has some information about monochrome cameras here: http://www.maxmax.com/maincamerapage/monochrome-cameras

 

Do you remove the Bayer filter yourself or is there a European converter shop which can do this? If so, please do let us know so that we can link to it in our reference posts.

[Herra Kuulapaa]

Yes, I remove the filters myself. Been doing that mainly on Nikon Exmor series, but Canon too.

Exmors are harder to modify than the current Canon lineup, but provide more homogeneous sensor surface after the mod. And I must say that I really like the Exmor performace :)