Off Topic Nikon P900/1000

I just bought the p900 and need advice on full settings for moon shots and fire works for new years eve.Thanks in advance.

thegoldman24 wrote:I just bought the p900 and need advice on full settings for moon shots and fire works for new years eve.Thanks in advance.

I just bought this camera as well, I haven't tried moon shots or fire works, full settings for these are in the scene mode settings. I am liking this camera so far a lot to learn.

it seems Nikon are rumoured to be coming out with a p1000 with 125x zoom.What a beast that will be.

thegoldman24 wrote:I just bought the p900 and need advice on full settings for moon shots and fire works for new years eve.Thanks in advance.

Set to spot Focus or averaging.I set Moon mode in scene selections, point n shoot.

Zoom as close as you can and still get good focus. I find less than max zoom to be best. Hold camera steady against a post or put it on a tripod, Set first pressure on shutter button to focus and then snap. Cam will wait a second or two before firing. (don't move cam during this time)

Go to Trim mode and crop to the magnification that you want and save the trimmed pic.

All of the shots that I have put in this topic are hand held against a pergola post.

For fireworks. Select Fireworks mode in scene select and put the cam on a tripod, frame your shot and shoot.
You could also do a night Scene vid or a time laps vid for fireworks.... The Night Scene vid would be best because the time lapse will not capture all moments of the scene and will miss many cracker bursts.

Experiment a bit on street lights and traffic at night to get a feel for the camera. That is the beauty of digital cams. You can practice and learn and then delete all the bad pics or practice runs.

thanks Adrian ss, that's helpful for me as well. I have been reading up on this camera ever since you put your first pic's up, now got it at a good price.

Hello everyone
Great topic!!!

This picture was taken by my brother
The goanna stealing cockatoos eggs, thats natures way.

Nice one Jen.
The cocky looks big enough to sort the goanna out.
We get a lot of cockatoos in the yard but I have yet to see one get seriously nasty with anything. They prance around each other a bit and have a bit of a beak bash but do not seem to be all that keen on inflicting a serious injury to each other.

Ahh, the serenity, sometimes you just need some time to yourself.









Other times,  you want to mix it with with some good ol party dudes!








Finally found my first piece of gold (.66gr) with the Zed this year,  I thought I had lost my mojo.
After 8 months off for my double bypass operation. I didn't really understand what an addiction searching for gold is, till I took the 8 months off.    

Love the pictures, looks so peaceful

Congrats on getting out for a detect Harry.

A clean sun. Zero sun spots at sun spot minimum.

WOW!!!

What an awesome picture
I mean Hot

Yes Jen even though the sun is very quiet as far as sunspot activity is concerned it is pumping out some serious electromagnetic and cosmic style radiation lately.
    Just like our Easter has been very quiet this year although  our daughter came down for a couple of days which was nice as I had not seen her for a while. She scored a gold and silver medal at  the International fitness and body building championships at Cronulla last month.
I would put a pic up here but she might rip my head off. Anyway I am very happy with her success in the sport.
    Managed 20 mins of detecting this morning with the SST and scored a ring and a few odds and ends.

The sun sure has a bite too it these days

Awww no pictures. That’s ok. I would rip your head off if I was her as well
She has done very well, pass my congrats to her

Good that you managed to get out for a detect.
My detector hasn’t seen the light of day since we left W.A

Some pyro morons set light to the hill across the road last night.

Hey Adrian, First thought was you had captured a spectacular space junk landing......

No such luck. I do not know of anybody getting any pics of the Sat coming down??

Why would anybody want to go there aye??
Snapped with P900 in Moon mode and on a tripod.


One lil ole lonely sunspot that is slightly larger than the diameter of the earth.

Been taking a few pics of the night sky and snagged a ufo??
   
The fuzzy egg shaped object appeared in two photos of the Southern Cross region. I did not notice it when taking the pic.
Whatever it is it moved during taking the two pics.
Exposure was 4 sec at 24mm ISO 800 and a delay of approx 1 minute between the two pics. The pics have been cropped slightly in the cam.

Anyone know what this bird is?
It is a new comer to my back yard.
Is slightly smaller than a maggie. and likes raw meat.

Hey Adrian ss have you attempted to take pictures of Saturn and venus yet with the 900?

Yes but no success yet.
The 900 does not like point light sources at high zoom settings. The cam can bring the image up to a reasonable size for Saturn Venus Jupiter and Mars but it is a spotty image like a circle made up of lots of dots of light rather than a smooth image. It is a bit like looking at a street light through a rain spattered car wind screen
Either the CCD is dodgy or the camera does not have enough resolution at high magnification.

Hello Adrian ss if venus is appearing as a round circle your camera hasn't focused correctly.BTW lm no expert but there is a way to manually force the camera to focus properly and you will need a flash light .Try this trick.Place in manual mode then put into manual focus mode using the multi sensor control at rear of your camera.MF then OK. Then rotate multi selector control clockwise and the bar on the righttravels to the top.Keep moving until you you get the image as small as possible on the screen.Now you need to correct exposure so a torch may be used.Holding the light in the lens will force the camera to expose for bright scene then press right on the ok ring and this will lock in current exposure AE-L auto exposure locked will appear at top of the screen.Check exposure of venus now if over exposed use a brighter light source or if under exposed shine a light partially at lens.When correct the glare will ne gone and you can the fine tune the focus. cheers

Adrian,
The bird may be a Brown-headed Cowbird.
Similar colouring to our Bower Bird.

Photos I've seen though do not have the brilliant blue/purple eyes??


https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/young-cowbirds-dont-know-their-cowbirds-until-hear-this-song

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/id-brown-streaky-birds/

adrian ss wrote:Yes but no success yet.
The 900 does not like point light sources at high zoom settings. The cam can bring the image up to a reasonable size for Saturn Venus Jupiter and Mars but it is a spotty image like a circle made up of lots of dots of light rather than a smooth image. It is a bit like looking at a street light through a rain spattered  car wind screen
Either the CCD is dodgy or the camera does not have enough resolution at high magnification.

The small 1/2.3"-type BSI-CMOS sensor is the problem here and that sensor was designed for mini pocket-cameras.  I can't understand why Nikon didn't use a larger one on the P900.  At least a 1 inch sensor would have been a massive problem-solver here.  And Nikon already have a 1 inch sensor available that they use with other cameras.  With the lens elements in place, there's an amount of diffraction that occurs when the lens is extended and this will aoften the images by altering contrast and "misting" the resulting images.  Shooting the planets is difficult at the best of times.

They just released the Coolpix P1000 and it has the same sensor (???) but an even longer zoom lens (24mm-3000mm eqiv).  Oddly enough, it has 4K video - which will appeal to some.


The new Nikon P1000 alongside the P900.


Nikon P1000.


Nikon P1000.- Nikon Sample





The issue with smaller sensors is that they can't resolve detail sufficiently and this was why I passed on the P900 (although I spent a lot of time considering this camera when I first came across it).  The new P1000 is much larger and heavier and the defucosed backgrounds are busy (due again to the small sensor) instead of soft.  It weighs about 1.5kg with the battery in place and that's quite heavy to pack and carry.  But it has a 1cm minimum distance for focus so it can shoot Macro although the sample pics with the moon look a bit messy when you zoom in on the crater details.


Shot over a Winter Solstice Bonfire... which was pretty stupid of me. Shot with a Canon mirrorless with an EF lens + extenders

I attended a Winter Solstice Bonfire the other day and decided to see how many planets I could photograph with the moon rising over the fire.  The heat from the Bonfire caused the air to ripple which made it hard for me but it was too cold to move far from the heat... so I stupidly stayed where I was.  I'd mounted some extenders to my lens but was using APS-C mirrorless to benefit from the crop involved.  I really need to get an EQ Mount with tracking to enable some deep sky imaging. I was out in the Blue Mountains last night and the air was bitterly cold.  But I found some new locations to set up at when Spring and Summer return.  Mars is reaching Opposition in just over a week and will be the second closest pass in 60,000 years.  The closest was in 2003.  The next time Mars will be close to this large in the sky will be around 2050.




The P900 may drop in price now that the P1000 has been announced.  I'm not sure what the price of the new camera ought to be at but the retailer I buy from has it listed as a Pre-Order at $1548.  The original P900 is listed at $699 right now.  But there's a caution to users of the new model that camera-shake may force photographers to shoot remotely when using this camera at full zoom (handshake at 3,000 may not be controlled well with the stabilizer).

I don't think that the added zoom of the P1000 will resolve much more detail from the planets if the sensor is still the same size - although there ought to be additional magnification. My guess is that smaller apertures would be involved with larger focal lengths and this would dim the image of the planets.  I'm curious to see what people get out of it though. The new model (P1000) has a Moon Mode and a means to alter the colors when shooting the moon (see second video). I'm not likely to buy a P1000 but I can see how useful it will be and I suspect it will force other manufacturers into considering similar cameras. Hopefully with larger sensors.

adrian ss wrote:Anyone know what this bird is?
It is a new comer to my back yard.
Is slightly smaller than a maggie. and likes raw meat.

Satin Bowerbird
http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Ptilonorhynchus-violaceus

Great find Goldie, so it is a bower bird!

[quote="nero_design"]

"The small 1/2.3"-type BSI-CMOS sensor is the problem here and that sensor was designed for mini pocket-cameras. " 

Hi Nero, excuse my ignorance, but what does this sensor exactly do? Could a good camera mechanic retrofit the larger sensor into the 900?

goldie wrote:

adrian ss wrote:Anyone know what this bird is?
It is a new comer to my back yard.
Is slightly smaller than a maggie. and likes raw meat.

Satin Bowerbird
http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Ptilonorhynchus-violaceus

So it is a female Satin Bower Bird. Thanks for the replies.
It was interesting to watch it almost snatch a bit of raw mince meat from under the nose of a maggie.

Thanks for the replies re the P900. Plenty of food for thought there.
I agree nero . The CMOS sensor is too small  for planet pics at high zoom with the lens of the 900.
  Tried fudging the exp and auto focus by aiming at very distant distant street lights and then holding the setting back on Venus and Jupiter. Result was better but still crap
    The manual focus is a pain on the 900 and results have not been much better than in Auto.

This is what I can get from Jupiter and still pick out the main moons. But over exp on the planet.

adrian ss wrote:Thanks for the replies re the P900. Plenty of food for thought there.
I agree nero . The CMOS sensor is too small  for planet pics at high zoom with the lens of the 900.
  Tried fudging the exp and auto focus by aiming at very distant distant street lights and then holding the setting back on Venus and Jupiter. Result was better but still crap
    The manual focus is a pain on the 900 and results have not been much better than in Auto.

This is what I can get from Jupiter and still pick out the main moons. But over exp on the planet.

I get exactly the same result with my own camera and lenses (Canon) and the only way I can capture Jupiter with moons is to take two shots and try to blend them in Photoshop.  One exposure for the planet (to capture some very subtle banding on the surface) and another for the moons (which has to be overexposed just to see them).  It's the only way I've been able to capture the scene as it appears.  I've seen shots from your camera showing Jupiter's banding and it's remarkable to see this with a handheld camera.  I'm at my limits with what I can get from my lenses and camera gear without buying a telescope of throwing a stupid amount of money at specialized lenses that are too heavy to carry etc.  I'll be very curious to see what the next (P1100?) camera offers.  Modern sensors and noise algorithms seem to handle a lot more than they could years ago.

With manual focus being difficult, is there a remote control that the P900 can use that might help with remotely focusing the camera?  There's one for the P1000 now but might that work with the P900?  I read that the people testing the P1000 had to use the remote to speed up the manual focus process.  I find it very tricky to focus on the planets and when high magnification is used, then tend to drift across the sky very quickly... making it hard to capture them.  A technique I use myself is to photograph Jupiter/Saturn when the moon is up... and the lock focus on the moon first. I'm not sure how the focus on the P900 works but if you can focus the lens on the detailed craters on one side of the moon, it ought to offer perfect focus for the planets.  Your image shows you were able to get the moons in focus with Jupiter so whatever technique you are using, it's working. I've tried manually stacking a few images of Jupiter but I'm using a Mac computer and there's no decent stacking software that I can use for free. So I just layered them in Photoshop and lined them up manually. The results were only slightly better than the shots I was able to get. I think an EQ Tracking mount might help us.



With more zoom, the images tend to degrade and only the quality of the optics will enable detail to be captured.  I have to use two different extenders and a 400mm zoom (totaling 1803.2mm with the APS-C sensor I'm using) to get close to the magnification you are able to get with your P900.  I can't imagine that the new P1000 would offer an improvement because of the additional zoom but it's possible.  When using really strong zoom lenses there's a loss of contrast and then diffraction ends up removing a lot of detail. But I know that Nikon are using top quality optical glass in their super-zoom lenses.  For this reason, you'll probably be enjoying the best they can squeeze out of the camera+lens thanks to the laws of physics.

Slimpickens wrote:Hi Nero, excuse my ignorance, but what does this sensor exactly do? Could a good camera mechanic retrofit the larger sensor into the 900?

That would sure make things easier if we could.  But there's a fair bit of science that goes into where the image from the lens gets projected.  At the moment, the image that the lens sees gets projected precisely onto the tiny sensor that's at the back of the camera.  If we found a way to fit a larger sensor in there, it would need to be seated at least another inch deeper into the body for the lens to project onto it properly.  I believe the camera electronics only respond to the sensor that's in there and the microscopic connections around the sensor wafer are far too tiny for human hands.  Nikon has a special multi-million dollar robot that can do it.  There's no way anyone else could solder those tiny connections... you can barely see them with a microscope.  Here's a sensor comparison that shows a comparison of the current sensors from Nikon.



There are benefits to using smaller sensors... I tend not to use my Full Frame cameras unless I'm taking wide-sky images.  The smaller APS-C sensor (and Canon's APS-C is slightly smaller than Sony and Nikons APS-C) means I can use the lens crop to increase my zoom a little.  So as wonderful as Full Frame might be with a wide lens, it's problematic if you want more zoom from a telephoto lens.  Nikon's small 1/2.3" sensor might be taking advantage of the projected image circle from the long lens on the P900/P1000 cameras.  I think that if they'd used a larger sensor, there would be even more length to the body of the camera but it would allow for much more light and softer backgrounds.

These cameras (the Nikon Super-Zooms) are marvels of technical engineering.  Try buying a lens for a DSLR that performs anywhere near these distances and you'll be paying around $15,000+ dollars for the privilege - and you'll still need to use Extenders to get close to the Nikon P camera focal lengths.  You've effectively got a telescope with a camera attached to it!

I think that whenever a new model of camera or lens comes out, there's a strong desire to want to "upgrade" the one you already own. But it's not always worth the trouble to do so. With the P1000 sporting the same sensor as the P900, it's possible that this new model offers only an increase in zoom but a loss of image quality at those higher magnifications. 3000mm is a HECK of a lot of zoom and I was surprised the P900 handled the amount of focal length that is did. These are well built cameras but I think I'd be inclined to wait for the reviews to come out ...and to even wait it out to see if a future model offers a slightly larger sensor. The lens is perhaps the weakest link though, so with good optics you ought to be able to capture some incredible shots with the modern 1/2.3" sensors.