Enhanced Live View for Astrophotography

[beewee]

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With the biggest geomagnetic storm to hit earth in 20 years yesterday, I headed out with the Q3 and SL2-S to capture the aurora.

While shooting, it was abundantly clear how useful Enhanced Live View (ELV) is for astrophotography as it is available on the SL2-S but not the Q3. The aurora was very strong and bright enough to drown out most of the stairs last night and with ELV enabled on the SL2-S, I was able to compose/frame like it was daytime which was a joy. The shooting experience was better than having an optical viewfinder. In contrast, the Q3 which lacked ELV was definitely much harder to compose and I had to fall back to more traditional ways to frame by taking a long exposure, adjusting the camera angle, taking another long exposure.

I’m really now wishing that Leica would add ELV to the Q3.

[LeicaR10]

Beewee,   i use the ELV often on the SL2-S and its a great feature.  If enough people email Leica Customer Care the company will often add the feature to the firmware.  Last, did you get any good photographs of the aurora the other night?   If you did, maybe you will post a few on the SL2-S image thread and let us know what lens you found best for that night event.  Thank you in advance.  r/ Mark

[beewee]

12 hours ago, LeicaR10 said:

Last, did you get any good photographs of the aurora the other night?   If you did, maybe you will post a few on the SL2-S image thread and let us know what lens you found best for that night event.

I was mainly taking frames for timelapse’s but here’s a DNG export from Lightroom SOOC without any edits.

SL2-S + Sigma 14/1.4 DG DN (Linked to the Sigma 14/1.4 thread on this forum) @ f1/4, 1s, ISO6400.

This setting works amazingly well for time-lapse since there’s no in-camera noise reduction required which means no time gap between frames, ISO is low enough to get some really clean images off the SL2-S, and by keeping the exposure time low, you can capture all the finer details in the aurora which can change and move quite rapidly. With longer exposure times of 2-5+ seconds, it can start to smear the finer rays within the aurora.

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Edited May 12, 2024 by beewee
Added link to the Sigma 14/1.4 thread

[beewee]

With the Sigma 14/1.4 being somewhat ‘reasonably priced’ by Leica standards and the SL2-S used prices dropping as well as the OG Panasonic S5 prices also pretty low, it’s now got me thinking about building a rig similar to this: https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/features/how-i-use-my-unique-camera-rigs-to-take-spectacular-aurora-images

[LeicaR10]

Peewee,  Thank you for taking time to post your photograph and links.   I am would think being there to see the event was spectacular.  r/ Mark

[beewee]

5 hours ago, LeicaR10 said:

Peewee,  Thank you for taking time to post your photograph and links.   I am would think being there to see the event was spectacular.  r/ Mark

Yeah, it was by far the strongest show I’ve seen in real-life. At one point the entire sky was lit up in all 360 degrees.