f-22 Night-time long exposure shooting

[batmura]

Can anyone tell me why some photographers choose to stop down to f-22 when doing long exposure photos at night rather than going for the "sweet spot" of their lens and dial in something like f-8 or f-11? Would f-22 ensure more depth of field or do they choose it in order to be able to use shorter exposure time? I've shot a couple of long exposure shots at both f-8 and f-22 using the same exposure and cannot see much of a change on screen.

 

[TCampbell]

Points of light will take on a behavior where they begin to look like stars IF you use a very tiny aperture. Obviously only at night or a sunset -- some time when you have "point" light sources that can create diffraction spikes.

 

[UnknownBro]

I thought this was going to have pix of an F-22 flying at night/light painting.

 

[DiskoJoe]

Like TCampbell said. You can do stuff like this:


_DSC9121 by DiskoJoe, on Flickr

I intentionally shot this at f22 to get the exaggerated streaks from the lights. This is more exagerrated then some lenses will do since I shot this with my sigma 70-210 and it has a tendency to flare a lot already.

 

[KmH]

The spikes are cause by the lens aperture blades or the support structure for a reflecting telescope's secondary mirror, and are known as 'diffraction spikes'.

Diffraction spike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[tirediron]

I thought this was going to have pix of an F-22 flying at night/light painting.

Me too! I wanna refund!

 

[Dikkie]

From my experience, the image is less sharp smaller than F11, while in theory, it should be more depth of field.
I now only shoot at max F 8 , or at sweet spot of F 5.6 ... depending on how many seconds the shuttertime will be. I don't like to wait long to see the result.
Damn shuttertimes of 30 seconds + 30 seconds waiting while doing the long exposure noise reduction process...

 

[Tinderbox (UK)]

I missread the title, i was expecting some long exposure F-22 Raptor photo`s :blushing: