In the last post I talked about some technicalities of producing images, so here is the result of the effort for increased sharpness and reduced noise (although at this size you cannot see the difference!):
The focal length of the lens was set to 24mm – this is equivalent to about 55mm on a 35mm format. For my moonlight photography I wanted to see what a 50mm (= 80mm on a 35mm format) lens would be like to see if it was worth pursuing in terms of what shows – this is the result:
As this view is taken from about 10ft from the ground, and there is not much of interest in the foreground (everything is on the horizon), the use of a 50mm lens works quite well. However the downside is that a lot more photos need to be taken to create the panoramic image – in this case 19 as opposed to 11 in the first example.
So my conclusion is that the 50mm lens will work for this view and using, say, f2 or f2.8 instead of f8 give 3 to 4 stops more light cutting the exposure time from 30 seconds to 2 to 4 seconds. I may even be able to try some hdr with this!
To get a slightly larger version of the image, click on the photo.