My experience with long exposure…

[Olaf_ZG]

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Over the last two years I switched from fuji to leica. Fuji (gfx) is second best for long exposures after Hasselblad: bright daylight, 19 stops ND, NR off, 16min exposure no problem.

I knew the SL2-s could not match this, but tests at home with a lenscap on proved to be promising: only few white spots.

So I tried some in real life, ND 10 stops, only 4 minutes, but the results are bad: like it is snowing in summer.

So, the 2-series is not for me regarding long exposure. Not sure what the 3 will bring, but, a new body will cost as much as a 907x, which has other advantages as well as disadvantages….

 

[SrMi]

13 minutes ago, Olaf_ZG said:

Over the last two years I switched from fuji to leica. Fuji (gfx) is second best for long exposures after Hasselblad: bright daylight, 19 stops ND, NR off, 16min exposure no problem.

I knew the SL2-s could not match this, but tests at home with a lenscap on proved to be promising: only few white spots.

So I tried some in real life, ND 10 stops, only 4 minutes, but the results are bad: like it is snowing in summer.

So, the 2-series is not for me regarding long exposure. Not sure what the 3 will bring, but, a new body will cost as much as a 907x, which has other advantages as well as disadvantages….

 

For the record, M11 fares very well at long exposures.

[Olaf_ZG]

54 minutes ago, SrMi said:

For the record, M11 fares very well at long exposures.

That’s why I have my hopes on the SL3, as a tilting screen is really helpful on a tripod with either low or high viewpoints.

[jaapv]

12 hours ago, Olaf_ZG said:

Over the last two years I switched from fuji to leica. Fuji (gfx) is second best for long exposures after Hasselblad: bright daylight, 19 stops ND, NR off, 16min exposure no problem.

I knew the SL2-s could not match this, but tests at home with a lenscap on proved to be promising: only few white spots.

So I tried some in real life, ND 10 stops, only 4 minutes, but the results are bad: like it is snowing in summer.

So, the 2-series is not for me regarding long exposure. Not sure what the 3 will bring, but, a new body will cost as much as a 907x, which has other advantages as well as disadvantages….

 

There is a good reason that Leica offers LENR. You are basically right, different camera makers have different levels of in-camera noise reduction. Nikon and Fuji are quite aggressive, resulting in a relatively noise-free but degraded image. Leica’s choice is LENR which maintains image quality but has an annoying wait. The sensor noise as such is much the same, after all some cameras share the same sensor but behave differently regarding noise. 

[frame-it]

12 hours ago, Olaf_ZG said:

That’s why I have my hopes on the SL3, as a tilting screen is really helpful on a tripod with either low or high viewpoints.

you mean the SL3 will have tilting screen??

[Stuart Richardson]

no one knows...unless they are under nda and feel ok to violate it. It is not a bad assumption though.

[Olaf_ZG]

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1 hour ago, frame-it said:

you mean the SL3 will have tilting screen??

It’s my hope based on the Q3. I don’t know though.

[Pelu2010]

3 hours ago, Olaf_ZG said:

It’s my hope based on the Q3. I don’t know though.

Have you used the new Denoise AI from Adobe (PS) 

Or Topaz? 

I find that this eliminate the noise problem. 

[jaapv]

In my experience those are not very effective on long exposure hot pixels. 

[SrMi]

2 hours ago, jaapv said:

In my experience those are not very effective on long exposure hot pixels. 

I have tried Adobe DeNoise, DxO PureRAW, and Topaz DeNoise, and all reduce the visibility of some hot pixels but do not eliminate them.

[Paul2660]

Best solution I have found for hot or stuck pixels is Capture One and its single pixel noise reduction. It works very well on these types of exposures. Single pixel noise reduction is one of the sliders under the noise reduction tool. Note it only works on stuck pixel noise not traditional noise.  File has to be taken as a raw file as SPNR  will only work on raw files. Tool has no degradation of the rest of the file ie softness and loss of detail. 
 

Paul

[beewee]

On 7/12/2023 at 1:29 PM, Olaf_ZG said:

ND 10 stops, only 4 minutes, but the results are bad: like it is snowing in summer.

Have you tried using some astrophotography post-processing software tools? I personally prefer to capture everything in a single exposure, even if that means I have LENR enabled and require a dark frame to be taken. However, there are software tools more geared towards astrophotography that may be useful in for your use case.

For example, some software support taking a single long exposure dark frame that you can use to correct/remove hot pixels for all other photos being processed as a batch. Another option is to take shorter exposures and stack them in software to reduce noise. You can of course also apply a combination of different techniques that include dark frame compensation and exposure stacking to get the desired end results. It’s a lot more work in post-processing which is why I prefer to just use LENR but it’s an option if you’re willing to do more post processing.

On a slightly different but related note, you probably have some reasoning for performing long exposures in daylight. If the purpose of this is to capture a certain effect like smoothing out moving water or getting rid of people in the scene, some cameras like the Panasonic S5II support mimicking long exposures where it can do frame stacking in camera to achieve a very similar effect and still output a DNG file that you can edit in post. It even provides a live preview of the shot as the camera is stacking frames and you can stop the capture whenever you want. The stacks the frame using some averaging or median filter rather than an additive manner so you never need to worry about over exposure of the frame as the exposure of the DNG is time invariant.

Edited July 16, 2023 by beewee