Dark Skies with Lumix S1RII

I recently did some night-sky testing with Panasonic’s LUMIX S1RII camera and 18mm f/1.8 lens. I wanted to see how this combination performed, particularly with a dark foreground, and whether Panasonic fixed the issues in the OG S1R that made it unreliable for night photography. It was also a nice evening to enjoy some night photography at a location I hadn’t shot before. In short, I threw some challenging conditions at this camera and am happy with its performance. The 18mm lens is also small and light enough to bring along on any trip and seems to render stars well.

And as a reminder, I do have a new book available. Click here for more information.

My first stop was the Hungry Horse Reservoir near Glacier National Park. I picked this location because the view of the reservoir from the dam is to the southeast which lined up well with the stars and there are no cities in the area to add light pollution. I had never visited the dam at night before and had no idea how lit up it would be. As it turned out, the lights around the dam are fairly dim and added some nice brightness to the landscape. Unfortunately the dam itself added a shadow to the scene that I didn’t really care for.

I also captured the scene with a Sigma 14mm f/1.8 lens which I already knew performs well at night. The lens was wide enough that some of the lights near the dam hit the bulbous front element and created some lens flare.

I drove by Lion Lake on my way to the dam and thought it could also be a good subject. After seeing the light and shadow on the foreground by the dam, I decided to head back to Lion Lake for darker conditions. I found a spot next to the lake and set up with the 18mm lens. For this scene, I exposed for the sky and let the ground go dark. Once I got back to my computer I’d have a chance to see how much detail I could pull out of the shadows before it gets overwhelmed by noise. I was graced with a meteor in one of the frames I captured.

I spent some time capturing images at different ISO settings as an experiment to determine how I want to use this camera in the future. Because I want to stars to look like points rather than streaks, my exposure time was limited to 20 seconds for each shot. I also kept the lens wide open at f/1.8 to maximize the amount of light in each frame. I then captured images at ISO 800, 1600, 2000, 3200, and 6400 and adjusted the exposure in post-processing to equalize the brightness across each file. My goal was to determine which ISO, once processed in a manner I like, produced the best quality overall final image.

If you are here just for pretty pictures, feel free to stop here. The rest of this post is geek stuff 🙂

I’ll present some sample images below, but my conclusion is that ISO 1600-2000 gave me the best result. The ISO 800 image once brightened an extra stop was much noisier than the other images. ISO 3200 and 6400 worked well from a noise standpoint, but started losing detail. I did see some color shifting in the darkest areas, with the left side of the image slightly green and the right side slightly magenta. I was able to correct much of this in post processing but I didn’t love it. I did note that this was not observed in my images from the dam that weren’t completely black in the foreground. Below are the full frame images at each ISO from Lion Lake. Each of these was only processed in Lightroom with minimal “classic” noise reduction applied.

At web sizes they all look fine, as I would expect. The differences become more clear at 100%. The following pictures are 100% crops of the rocks on the left side of the image. Following those are 100% crops of the treetops and stars on the left.

The following photos show how the images hold up as the exposure is increased in post processing. I am using the ISO 1600 version of the image shown above, and showing the results pushing the exposure from +0 to +3 stops. The image holds up OK to +2 stops, although you start seeing a green tint on the left and a purple tint on the right. This gets much more pronounced at +3 stops. Lightroom luminance noise reduction is at 25 for each of these (and all of the images above for that matter).