Sorry I’m not sure I understand the question. Monochrome won’t decrease the amount of light it just makes it all black and white. So it won’t have an effect on light pollution.

Thanks for your feedback Darlene, I really appreciate it. Keep your awesome tips and tutorials coming.

Nice! notice the light pollution in the bottom? The city lights and being close to them causes that, it also means less stars will show up in the image. Try getting away from the city a bit more or street lights.

A larger aperture will help slightly but unless you go like f/1.8 it’s not going to make that big a difference. An f/2.8 lens is only a small difference from 3.5. Yes do processing in LR to help. You can’t get rid of all of it but go as far as you can without making it a big blurry mess.

Awesome, good discovery – glad to help.

Thank you, the settings on my camera were optimal this time than any last attempts of the Milky Way. I previously was getting more of a saturation on the photos before when I raised the ISO and that was confusing me this whole time. I just now went back to the older shots and EUREKA! I shot in RAW and looked at my settings, my WB was set on cloudy… I feel foolish now (egg on my face). Thank you for pointing out the pollution and ISO differences (it help me research my error). Now off to change a few settings and see if my lightroom skills are getting better to fix some older photos. Thank you again Darlene.

Thanks Darlene. These exposures were 30 seconds.

Maybe a faster lens would be better then I can pull back on the ISO and take advantage of the wider aperture? When looking at the image at full size, it is very grainy so it’s either that or go crazy in Lightroom post processing to cut the noise?

looks really good. Just to be clear, light pollution and noise are two different things. Light pollution is what you see at the bottom of your image, the glow on the horizon from city lights. Raising your ISO causes noise which are the overall speckles in the image.

Good job! You can do that but it will lengthen the exposure and you may start to get the stars arching. How long were these exposures?

thank you for pointing that out to me. Looks like I always fall into this trap of not seeing another aspect of the photo while PP a different part of it.

f3.5
ISO6400
18mm

Will pull back on the ISO next time to help lessen noise.

Nicely done! If you want to pull the Milky Way out a bit more in the bottom one pull the whites slider up to brighten the stars.

This is awesome good job!

I took this image in August 2012; probably not as good as others, but compared to my previous attempts with my little point and shoot cameras this was a dream come true, (I literally cried a little when I saw the finished product!). I followed the step-by-step instructions provided by another photographer on the DPS website; I can’t think of his name off hand, but can probably find the post if anyone is interested.

Cheers, Helen