Night kit that keeps my RAWs clean

Photography Tools of the Trade
1

Sharing the small kit that keeps my night shoots consistent. RAW hygiene:

  • Manual WB doesn’t matter in RAW, but I anchor with a twilight gray card shot and build a preset, so colors don’t drift.
  • ETTR until stars just separate from the left without clipping city glow. long‑exp NR off. ISO at native gain. shoot 20 darks and 20 flats with a dim EL panel.
  • I skip clip‑on astro filters. they skew greens. Composition:
  • I line the Milky Way with foreground lines I can feel in the dark: fences, roads, irrigation arms, or tide lines, then keep the horizon dead level and give the core a clean third. Backup plan on location:
  1. Write to two cards.
  2. After each sequence, copy to a USB‑C SSD with my phone.
  3. If dew hits, wrap the lens with hand warmers and gaffer tape and switch to wider frames if the tracker gets cranky. I keep a spare headlamp in my left pocket as a rule.
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Corner with mixed LED and amber streetlight, neon slicing the frame.
I grab a gray at dusk, base ISO, hood on, EVF taped. Import: flag gray, enable lens profile. WB from gray, set camera/DNG profile. ETTR, set blacks. Calibrate, HSL trims. NR 15/25, sharpen R0.7 M70. Fix verticals, crop to lines. Export sRGB 2560px, low sharpen. You mask highlights?

3

Last night, 35/2, hooded, no filter. Gray card at blue hour by a neutral wall, then everything at base ISO. Takeaway: one lens to control flare/coma. manual focus, magnify, tape ring. ETTR to just separate stars, no clipping. long-exp NR and in-camera NR off. lens profile on, chroma NR only in RAW. consent: if faces read, quick ‘ok to shoot?’—otherwise reframe.