Lighthouse - Night Photography Settings

[TPiorkowski]

Helo Forum,

I recently moved to a location that has a lighthouse near buy.

I plan to go there and try my luck photographing it at night.

The lighthouse has a concentrated beam of light every few seconds My goal is to capture the light beam, but, not as a sunstar.

Regarding the lense I plan to use, probably my 10-24mm.

I’m looking for any settings help that will help my accomplish getting the shot.

Any thoughts of dynamic range, ISO, etc., settings would be appreciated.

My other two lenses that I use are the 55-200, and the 18-55.  I thought the 10-24 would provide me with a being wide range capture.

My camera is the X-T2.

Again, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Tom

[jerryy]

Since you are close to the lighthouse, you may be able to experiment a little. Try treating it the same as getting an image of the full moon; say f11, pick your favorite ISO and set the shutter speed to 1/ ISO. Then take a longer exposure to get the background and blend the images. Use that as a baseline to speed up the shutter speed until you get what you want.

If you set the aperture to f16 or more with a longer exposure, you could end up getting the star rays, one ray per aperture blade, so be careful about that. Also, show us how they turn out!