Why are the stars motionless in the time-lapse of the starry sky? Shooting static stars

Photographing the night sky may seem like an impossible task and a real challenge for beginners, but I assure you, everything is much easier than you might think. Modern camera settings include incredible ISO settings, allowing photographers to dramatically increase their sensors' sensitivity to light, and capture the light of the stars like never before.

In this vein, I want to talk about the equipment you will need; how to install the camera correctly; I will also talk a little about composition and lighting. If you're ready to level up your shooting for the stars, let's get started!

What equipment will you need

At the most basic level, it will be enough for you: cameras (DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, soap dishes) capable of taking pictures in manual mode, wide angle lens, and tripod.

However, most consumer grade cameras are not capable of high quality long exposures and do not have good dynamic range. In order to get amazing photos of the Milky Way, try investing in vehicles by class, which are described below:

Camera selection

The best cameras on the market for photographing the night sky are cameras with full frame sensors. This is because they are able to work at high ISO and at the same time get a result acceptable in terms of noise, which is impossible to achieve when shooting from some primitive device. The higher your ISO, the brighter the night sky will look, and you just need a camera that shoots cleanly without any noise whatsoever.

Good cameras would be:

    Nikon: D810A, D750;

These recommendations are top brands and they don't come cheap, but they aren't necessary to get great photos. For example, the photo below was taken with the Sony DSC-RX100, which can be purchased for less than $500. To choose a camera, you need to decide what budget you are targeting, and build on that.

Lens selection

Just like with landscape photography, you'll want to have a wide-angle lens that can capture as much of the sky as possible. The faster the lens, that is, the smaller its f / aperture (f / 2.8 or less is excellent), the more light you can let in in a certain period of time to get good. Personally, I prefer Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 (for cameras with APS-C sensors); for its cost, its sharpness satisfies me.

Selecting camera settings

You will start to notice that the choice of settings for long exposures at night usually stays the same. This is because the first rule of shooting the night sky is to find a dark place that cancels out the dirty colors and allows the camera to draw the maximum amount of light from the sky; for this, the characteristics of our camera are simply increased to the maximum in order to get the best image. Rule #1: shoot in manual mode!

Aperture selection

Becomes much less visible at night, and in order to take in as much light as possible, make sure your aperture is wide open.

Excerpt

This feature is very important because most lenses begin to pick up star trails after 25 seconds of exposure. I used to shoot with a shutter speed of 30 seconds, but the movement of the stars was noticeable, so the faster the shutter speed, the clearer the stars will look.

ISO

The choice of ISO value depends on what kind of camera you have, or what kind of camera you want to buy. For example, Sony a7S shoots with clean exposure, up to 12000 ISO, while my Canon 6D can shoot up to 6400 ISO with minimal noise, which can then be leveled out in Lightroom.

Focus

One of the biggest challenges people face is focusing images when shooting at night. Many lenses have an "infinity focus" (manual focus), which is a point at an infinite distance at which the lens will focus. This is ideal for night photography as it is very difficult to see what you are focusing on in the dark.

Composition and light painting

Once you get the hang of the exposure process, the fun part is creating dynamic compositions and using light painting techniques to bring objects in the foreground to life.

Like landscape photography, you want the audience to feel separate from the picture. When shooting stars, it would be ideal to capture the scenery around you, then the night sky looks even more incredible.

To do this, find a good place to focus on the object in the foreground. Further, using a flashlight or even a smartphone screen, you can “draw” the object that you planned to light in your picture. This only takes a few seconds, as the reflected light is exposed very quickly in the case of night photography.

Tip: If you're using , position it in complete darkness, or take a short exposure to get it clearly. You can always stack 2 exposures one on top of the other and thus mix different ranges of light.

What to do after taking photos

Of course, handle them! Photographs of the night sky change drastically even with small fluctuations in white balance or contrast.

Almost every photo of the night sky I edit twice (once for the sky, once for the foreground) and then blend them. (Some photographers use the remote remote control to make the exposure much longer than the camera will allow, and use that for the foreground to add shadows.)

In the end, enjoy and develop a style that is unique to your preferences. Returning home with photos of stars, you experience incredible sensations!

Several people have asked me to write a simple tutorial on how I take pictures of the night sky. I'm not an astrophotographer anyway, and I don't have special expensive equipment. I just read a few articles, found a dark place on the coast and tried to do my best.

Anyway, here's how I did it.

1. What do you need

You need a camera with manual exposure control. Most SLR cameras have a feature called "Bulb" (B, Bulb) and that's exactly what we need.

You will also need a remote control or tether to minimize camera shake while shooting.

You will definitely need a tripod.

2. Selecting a shooting point

The darker the place, the better. Shooting stars in your backyard is possible, but for best results, it's best to choose a location away from city lights. These lights tend to degrade the image quality and make the stars less visible.

3. Camera settings

First, try using a lens with a wide aperture. In my case it was a Sigma 28mm lens at f/3.5.

Second, set your camera's ISO to high. I tried shooting at both 1600 and 800 ISO and got good results in both cases.

Third, to avoid star trails (meaning fixing the movement of stars due to the rotation of the Earth), you should use the 600 rule, which is very simple: divide 600 by focal length lens being used. In my case, I divided 600/28 = 21.42 (meaning I can leave the shutter open for 21 seconds and avoid star blur).

Finally, set your lens to manual focus and focus on infinity (this will be the symbol at the end of the row of numbers on your lens).

4. Capture a frame

Mount your camera on a tripod and shoot at least 5 consecutive frames of stars using the correct shutter speed (calculated using the 600 rule). Do not move the camera to another point or change settings until you are done with this series of images.

Tip: Every time I finish one such series, I put my hand on the front of the lens and take a picture. This way I know that a frame that is completely black is the end of the series.

5. Image processing

Don't be discouraged if you don't see colors in your footage. This is fine. You will need to draw out the colors in Photoshop or any other image editor.

First of all, you need to merge the images. This means that one image should be superimposed on others (not on all, but only on those that belong to the same series). You can do this with free program called Deep Sky Stacker. Just use the standard program settings. The final image will be a large TIF file that you use to pull colors in Photoshop.

Then open this TIF file in Photoshop and adjust the curves and levels. You can follow this simple video tutorial:

I also edit blue, red and green colors in levels to make the nebulae more visible.

That's all.

Here is the original image and the final result.

Shooting the starry sky has become very popular and since we are talking about shooting at slow shutter speeds, let's talk about shooting the starry sky.

Here are a couple of tools and tips for capturing starry skies and star trails. Don't forget that you will need a lot of time to shoot. To shoot the starry sky, the night must be clear, dark and cloudless. Moonlight is not good for shooting stars. A large number of stars can be seen in particularly dark places where there is no light pollution from the city and street lighting. In such places in the night sky you can even see the Milky Way. By the way, during our photo tours to Spain, you will be in such a place. We will live in a real Andalusian house (finca) in a nature reserve, surrounded by almond trees and flowers. Near the house you can see hares, lizards, eagles and other birds and animals. There are no towns or villages around the house for a few kilometers. Therefore, from the roof of the house or from the terrace, you can take a picture of the star trail with almond trees in the foreground.

polar Star

The North Star is located at the direction of the imaginary axis around which the Earth rotates. If you include the pole star in your image, you will get a fixed point in the sky around which all other stars will revolve. In order to shoot beautiful star trails, you need to know roughly where everything is in the sky. It is not necessary to know all the constellations in the sky, but knowing where the stars or constellations that are important to your shooting are located is very helpful.

The North Star can be found very easily in the night sky. She - as we have already written - is located at the point of direction of the imaginary axis around which the Earth rotates, passing through the North Pole. Contrary to many claims, the North Star is not the brightest star in the night sky. This is a rather inconspicuous star, but with a few tricks it is easy to find it in the sky.

Even if you do not know anything about the stars, you can easily find the constellation Ursa Major. The polar star is next to it. Mentally extend the imaginary line of the front of Ursa Major 5 times, and you will see the polar star, located in the constellation Ursa Minor.

You can quickly and easily find the north star using an iPhone or smartphone application such as "Google Sky Maps". There you can get information such as the names of stars, planets, the direction of the North Pole, etc. If you place the pole star somewhere in your image, it will be the pivot of all the surrounding stars.

Training

If you arrive at the shooting location in the dark, it will take some time for your eyes to adjust to the lighting conditions. If the sky is clear, then you will quickly see a huge number of stars. Especially in mountainous areas, it takes your breath away at the sight of the starry sky. We set up a tripod, choose the direction of shooting and the foreground. Depending on the shooting direction, you will have different shape star trails. From the side polar star you will get round tracks, when shooting to the south, the tracks will be more straight.

Lens

When shooting with wide-angle lenses, even with a shutter speed of about 40 seconds, you still won't see star trails. And you will see them if you shoot with a telephoto lens.

Excerpt

Already with a shutter speed of 30 seconds, short trails of stars can be seen in the photograph. If you want to capture interesting, impressive star trails, your shutter speed needs to be significantly slower. The stars move very slowly across the sky (more precisely, the Earth rotates slowly), so plan to shoot one motive for at least 2 hours. Better, of course, to have even more time for each motive. The longer you shoot in one place, the more spectacular the star trails look in the picture.

Star Treks can be shot with multiple minutes/hours of exposure, or a snapshot can be created from multiple shots. When shooting with a 2-hour exposure, the disadvantage is that it is almost impossible to evaluate the result in advance. Often the picture is too bright and noisy. Therefore, it makes sense to take several pictures and combine them either in Photoshop or using, for example, a program Startrails.de

In order to correctly determine the shutter speed, you can use the calculator that we talked about yesterday.

Camera settings

The camera settings for this kind of photography are quite simple. Aperture according to your creative needs (usually f8 to f11). ISO no more than 100, otherwise the pictures will be very noisy.

Exposure time 5-10 minutes, preferably 15 minutes for individual shots. How many shots will be needed to shoot for about 3 hours, you can easily calculate.

You can use a programmable remote control where you can set the number of shots and the shooting interval. Press the start button once and then wait until everything is over.

Focus

In total darkness, it is often difficult to find a suitable point to focus on. Focus on some distant light point or with a flashlight (i.e. create a focus point yourself with a flashlight). Once you've found a point to focus on, don't forget to disable autofocus, otherwise the camera will again try to focus on the black sky.

If you can't find the focus point, manually set the focus to "infinity". However, keep in mind that the range of sharpness of many lenses does not extend to infinity, so go back 1-2mm for optimal sharpness.

Equipment

Camera with the ability to set manual settings and the function Bulb
Tripod
Remote control

Photographing star trails takes time and patience. If you do everything right, you will be rewarded with great results.

Here are some photos of Australian photographer Lincoln Harrison for inspiration:






Find the best story Don't be lazy to go outside to take interesting pictures of the night sky. We live in the golden age of technology: every amateur photographer can make an image of the night sky. Meanwhile, ten years ago it was impossible, and five years ago it seemed advanced. Do not focus on one or more objects such as the Moon, a couple of stars, the Milky Way. Put our world right in the center of the universe, add something to the frame that we can see with the naked eye. Take a look around - for sure the landscape will provide you with some unique detail of the composition. In this regard, an unusual village in Arizona is a great place: Arizona Sky Village. It was specially built for lovers of the night sky; there are almost no lights in it, each house has its own telescope, and one of the streets is called the Milky Way. This is exactly what I wanted to show (the picture required a flash). I don't even know where else in the world you can get such a plot. There has been a significant breakthrough in photography: now anyone can take a picture of the universe. Everyone loves to see the Milky Way, especially if it's a really dark night. But recent achievements Digital photography makes it possible at any moment to "bring closer" a distant and incomprehensible Galaxy. One day, looking at one of the pictures of the starry sky, I thought: the fact that the Milky Way is so far away does not mean at all that it needs to be photographed through a large telescope. All I need is a wide-angle lens: yes, this is a huge Galaxy, but we are part of it! When I show young people my first published picture of the Milky Way, I always remind them that this is our home. The Earth lies on one of these vast spiral arms of the stars. The opportunity to photograph this is both new knowledge for humanity and great pleasure. Increase ISO Cacti Carnegia, Arizona. Photographer: Jim Richardson. A huge help in photographing the night sky was the progress in the photosensitivity of cameras. Seven years ago, ISO 1600 was extremely rare, but today ISO 6400 (and above) is commonplace. My standard exposure (the one I almost always use) for shooting the Milky Way is 60 seconds, f/2.8, and ISO 6400. These settings will show the Galaxy as a glowing cloud. This shot was taken with a 14mm ultra-wide lens; in this case, my default settings are extreme. But if you are shooting with a shorter lens, it is better to reduce the exposure time. Note: I am aware of the popular belief about a lot of noise at ISO 6400. The advice in this case is simple: there are so many noise reduction programs! Night landscape, American Samoa. Photographer: Jim Richardson. Technology does not solve all problems; There is a certain limit to the possibilities of shooting the night sky. You can't take this photo with a compact camera, but most DSLRs can do it. My traditional advice- purchase a lens with a large aperture value that allows you to take photos with an aperture value of 2.8 and below. Moreover, the wider such a lens, the better. But it is best to take a lens with a fixed focal length of about 24 mm and the ability to lower the f-number to 2.8. Of course, you also need a stable tripod. If you plan to go beyond the 30 second exposure, a remote control device is required. In this case, a cable with a built-in timer is especially convenient. And then learn to improvise. The night I took this photo in American Samoa, my tripod was still somewhere on the plane. So I installed the camera on the balcony ledge and propped it up with a bag of small pebbles. Golden Gate Bridge, California. Photographer: Jim Richardson. You can hope that you are lucky and the night will be moonlit, or you can foresee this in advance. Obviously, planning is more likely to lead to success. With the help of special applications, it is very convenient to track the weather and astronomical phenomena, so I knew for sure that on that night the beautiful moon would rise over the Golden Gate Bridge. There are many apps that will tell you when to expect the event you want to shoot. First of all, I recommend the app Photographer's Ephemeris, despite its strange name. Available on all major platforms, it reports moonrise and moonset times for any date, including the far future, from anywhere on Earth. And the link to satellite maps allows you to choose the exact location of the shooting. There are special astronomical applications that are useful when photographing objects in the Milky Way. They will tell you where this or that heavenly body will be visible from the selected point on Earth at the specified time. It's very nice. Personally, I like SkyGazer 4.5, but there are plenty of other great apps out there. Full Moon, Denver. Photographer: Jim Richardson."The full moon rises at sunset." Get it on your nose; this is the first (and easiest) thing to know. Fortunately, the Moon is one of the most predictable things in our lives (after the Sun and taxes). Those first few minutes at sunset, when the moon is just rising, are those golden moments to shoot, as the landscape is still lit by the setting sun, and it's a perfectly balanced light. But even with all the predictability of the moon, getting the right shot is not always easy. I took this photo in international airport Denver with a 600mm lens. I carefully planned everything and was almost ready to shoot, but when the moon peeked over the horizon, I was still a hundred meters from the required position. It was a stupid and unforgivable mistake: after all, the full moon happens no more than 13 times a year! I started to run as fast as I could, and still got the picture I wanted to take. Wind farm, Kansas. Photographer: Jim Richardson. Shooting moonlight can be both fun and challenging at the same time. Actually full moon very bright (try, for example, a 20 second shutter speed, f / 4 and ISO 400). The first reaction of many photographers is “The night landscape looks like it was taken in daylight!”. But slightly adjust the exposure in the negative direction so that the photo turns out to be less bright, include stars or some artificial night lights in the frame (for example, in this photo - objects wind farm in Kansas), and then the picture will get the plot and mood. Please note that the image on the camera's LCD screen is too bright, and as a result, if you focus on it, you will use the wrong settings and get too dark photos. Learn to evaluate an image's histogram and then trust it, not your own eyes. Arizona Sky Villages, Arizona. Photographer: Jim Richardson. Color balance can be a problem. Primarily because our eyes cannot see the color of the night sky. The Milky Way is visually just a gray mass somewhere above. We have no real perception of the true color of the night sky. Often at slow shutter speeds, the color is not at all what you expected: much warmer. A slightly more bluish color of the image will be closer to reality. Try in default settings set the white balance to Tungsten / Tungsten, which adds cold tones, instead of Daylight / Daylight. And shoot in RAW, not JPG! This will allow you to then correct the result. It was a stroke of luck during this shoot to meet a villager, Jack Newton. He went out into the street early morning when the sky was starting to turn blue. Jack had a red flashlight, and I could not miss the opportunity to paint the adobe walls with this amazing shade. Carry a flashlight Salt Lake Bonneville, Utah. Photographer: Jim Richardson. To take this picture on Bonneville Salt Lake, I crawled along the ground with a small flashlight. If someone had seen me at that moment, he would have thought that I had lost the keys: that's what I looked like. However, I did not lose anything: I illuminated the salt crests using a flashlight, which I always have with me. I started with a two-minute exposure, and for the first 10-15 seconds I illuminated the salt objects along the bottom of the lake with a flashlight. After viewing the received images on the LCD screen, I tried other settings. And after a little practice you will be able to create the right lighting with a tiny flashlight. "Gate of the West", St. Louis. Photographer: Jim Richardson. Shooting the night sky requires the ability to adapt to circumstances. You will have to constantly solve problems, but having coped with this, you will feel like a winner. Sometimes clouds can break your concept of a shot and you have to deal with it. When I was in St. Louis, Missouri, planning to shoot the famous Gateway of the West arch, I found the sky thick with clouds. It would seem that everything is gone! But no, that's what turned out to be a blessing. City lights gave the clouds an amazing "salmon" color (exactly what you see in the picture - I did not color correct), and spotlights painted strange patterns on the cloud canvas. Learning to play back your original idea and find another creative solution will help you get a great shot. cherish the night Bonfire, Burkina Faso. Photographer: Jim Richardson. Only possible way getting perfect shots of the night sky is to find an area with a dark sky. But in our world, crowded with urban lighting, it is very difficult to find such a place. Meanwhile, for tens of thousands of years, mankind has sat at night under the stars, admiring the wonders of the universe, just like this family in West Africa. We must not let the wonders of nature go out of our lives, and you and I can do a lot to bring it back. Already many activists in different cities of the world are working together with the local administration towards reducing light pollution at night. BUT international organization The Dark-Sky Association has developed many related environmental programs. We can keep the darkness of the magnificent night sky. And this is necessary not only for people to admire its beauty: we should not forget that many representatives of the fauna can only survive in darkness.

A huge help in photographing the night sky was the progress in the photosensitivity of cameras. Seven years ago, ISO 1600 was extremely rare, but today ISO 6400 (and above) is commonplace.

My standard exposure (the one I almost always use) for shooting the Milky Way is 60 seconds, F/2.8, and ISO 6400. These settings will show the Galaxy as a glowing cloud. This shot was taken with a 14mm ultra-wide lens; in this case, my default settings are extreme. But if you are shooting with a shorter lens, it is better to reduce the exposure time.

Note: I am aware of the popular belief about a lot of noise at ISO 6400. The advice in this case is simple: there are so many noise reduction programs!

Get ready and improvise

Night landscape, American Samoa. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

Technology does not solve all problems; There is a certain limit to the possibilities of shooting the night sky. You can't take this photo with a compact camera, but most DSLRs can do it. My traditional advice is to get a lens with a large aperture value that allows you to take photos with f-number 2.8 and below. Moreover, the wider such a lens, the better. But it is best to take a lens with a fixed focal length of about 24 mm and the ability to lower the f-number to 2.8.

Of course, you also need a stable tripod. If you plan to go beyond the 30 second exposure, a remote control device is required. In this case, a cable with a built-in timer is especially convenient.

And then learn to improvise. The night I took this photo in American Samoa, my tripod was still somewhere on the plane. So I installed the camera on the balcony ledge and propped it up with a bag of small pebbles.

Use astronomy apps to plan your shoot

Golden Gate Bridge, California. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

You can hope that you are lucky and the night will be moonlit, or you can foresee this in advance. Obviously, planning is more likely to lead to success. With the help of special applications, it is very convenient to track the weather and astronomical phenomena, so I knew for sure that on this night the beautiful moon would rise over the Golden Gate Bridge.

There are many apps that will tell you when to expect the event you want to shoot. First of all, I recommend the app Photographer's Ephemeris, despite its strange name. Available on all major platforms, it reports moonrise and moonset times for any date, including the far future, from anywhere on Earth. And binding to satellite maps will allow you to choose the shooting location as accurately as possible.

There are special astronomical applications that are useful when photographing objects in the Milky Way. They will tell you where this or that celestial body will be visible from the selected point on the Earth at the specified time. It's very nice. Personally, I like SkyGazer 4.5, but there are plenty of other great apps out there.

Learn more about the moon and stars

Full Moon, Denver. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

"The full moon rises at sunset." Get it on your nose; this is the first (and easiest) thing to know. Fortunately, the Moon is one of the most predictable things in our lives (after the Sun and taxes). Those first few minutes at sunset, when the moon is just rising, are those golden moments to shoot, as the landscape is still lit by the setting sun, and it's a perfectly balanced light.

But even with all the predictability of the moon, getting the right shot is not always easy. I took this photo at Denver International Airport with a 600mm lens. I carefully planned everything and was almost ready to shoot, but when the moon peeked over the horizon, I was still a hundred meters from the required position. It was a stupid and unforgivable mistake: after all, the full moon happens no more than 13 times a year! I started to run as fast as I could, and still got the picture I wanted to take.

Don't be afraid that moonlight is like daylight

Wind farm, Kansas. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

Shooting moonlight can be both fun and challenging at the same time. In fact, the full moon is very bright (try, for example, a 20 second shutter speed, f/4 and ISO 400). The first reaction of many photographers is “The night landscape looks like it was taken in daylight! ". But slightly adjust the exposure in the negative direction so that the photo turns out to be less bright, include stars or some artificial night lights in the frame (in this photo, the objects of a wind farm in Kansas are used as an example), and then the picture will get the plot and mood.

Please note that the image on the camera's LCD screen is too bright, and as a result, if you focus on it, you will use the wrong settings and get too dark photos. Learn to evaluate an image's histogram and then trust it, not your own eyes.

Adjust the white balance to correctly display the color of the night sky

Arizona Sky Villages, Arizona. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

Color balance can be a problem. Primarily because our eyes cannot see the color of the night sky. The Milky Way is visually just a gray mass somewhere above. We have no real perception of the true color of the night sky. Often at slow shutter speeds, the color is not at all what you expected: much warmer. A slightly more bluish color of the image will be closer to reality. Try setting the standard white balance settings to Tungsten / Tungsten, which adds cool tones, instead of Daylight / Daylight. And shoot in RAW, not JPG! This will allow you to then correct the result.

It was a stroke of luck during this shoot to meet a villager, Jack Newton. He went out into the street early in the morning, when the sky was already beginning to turn blue. Jack had a red flashlight, and I could not miss the opportunity to paint the adobe walls with this amazing shade.

Carry a flashlight

Salt Lake Bonneville, Utah. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

To take this picture on Bonneville Salt Lake, I crawled along the ground with a small flashlight. If someone had seen me at that moment, he would have thought that I had lost the keys: that's what I looked like. However, I did not lose anything: I illuminated the salt crests using a flashlight, which I always have with me. I started with a two-minute exposure, and for the first 10-15 seconds I illuminated the salt objects along the bottom of the lake with a flashlight. After viewing the received images on the LCD screen, I tried other settings. And after a little practice, you can create the right lighting with a tiny flashlight.

Do not succumb to adverse conditions

"Gate of the West", St. Louis. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

Shooting the night sky requires the ability to adapt to circumstances. You will have to constantly solve problems, but having coped with this, you will feel like a winner.

Sometimes clouds can break your concept of a shot and you have to deal with it. When I was in St. Louis, Missouri, planning to shoot the famous Gateway of the West arch, I found the sky thick with clouds. It would seem that everything is gone! But no, that's what turned out to be a blessing. City lights gave the clouds an amazing "salmon" color (exactly what you see in the picture - I did not do color correction), and spotlights painted strange patterns on the cloud canvas. Learning to play back your original idea and find another creative solution will help you get a great shot.

cherish the night

Bonfire, Burkina Faso. Photographer: Jim Richardson.

The only possible way to get perfect night sky shots is to find an area with dark skies. But in our world, crowded with urban lighting, it is very difficult to find such a place. Meanwhile, for tens of thousands of years, mankind has sat at night under the stars, admiring the wonders of the universe, just like this family in West Africa.

We must not let the wonders of nature go out of our lives, and you and I can do a lot to bring it back. Already many activists in different cities of the world are working together with the local administration towards reducing light pollution at night. And the international organization Dark-Sky Association has developed many relevant environmental programs.

In this article we will tell and show how to photograph the starry sky, the article will be useful for beginners - travelers or pros who are not used to photographing only themselves and sights on vacation different countries peace. We start to make a variety in photography and start with the question of how to take a photo of the starry sky.

Now let's decide on the option for displaying the stars, you can make the stars barely visible, or you can make the stars visible as a lot of spotlights clearly visible on a dark background, another option for photographing the starry sky is shooting the movement of stars, with this option you will get whole tracks of stars. All of the above options require a certain holding time. First option is suitable, if you set the shutter speed from 10 to 30 seconds in the camera settings. The second option will require setting the exposure time from 30 seconds to 1 minute and the third option from 5 minutes exposure to several hours.

Another separate option for photographing the starry sky is a professional option, which among photographers is called Timelapse, this direction is becoming more and more popular among photography. Secret this option in that you photograph one landscape very long time sometimes even a few days. The photo is taken with a break of about 1 second, then it's all glued into special program for video processing, the number of photos for a video clip in 1 minute is from 1000 pieces.

We will give a little advice if you buy reflex camera with hands, be sure to ask if timelapse was shot on your future camera, the thing is that after such a shooting option, many cameras fail with the shutter mechanism, which will additionally cost you a round sum to repair.

What do you need for photography

Let's return to the question - how to photograph the starry abyss. The next attribute for photographing the starry sky, we need a camera, we have already told you how to choose a camera, then you need a fast lens, if you don’t know how to choose a lens, then read ours, and the last attribute is a tripod. At the expense of a tripod, you should immediately warn if you shoot in winter time, set the tripod on the frozen ground for about five minutes. This technique allows the tripod to cool down and the legs of the tripod are finally fixed in the ground, thus the photograph at slow shutter speeds is not blurry.

So, to open the question, we need: a camera, a lens, a tripod, a night, a battery, and preferably a remote control for the shutter release. For those who do not know what a remote control is - a regular remote control for professional shooting at slow shutter speeds, many photographers call such a remote control - a cable.

We will give advice about the battery, since shooting at long exposures consumes the battery very quickly, for shooting we need either a fully charged battery or another spare. According to the technical data, the power consumption at long exposures is 10 times more than during normal shooting, draw conclusions if you need a spare battery.

So, after waiting for the nightfall, we begin to photograph the night landscape. Let's start with the exposure correct settings, follow our advice and write it down in your cheat sheet. Be sure to open the aperture to the maximum allowable value. In our case, the Sigma AF 15mm f/2.8 EX lens was used, the maximum aperture value for this lens is 2.8, you can take a lens with an even higher aperture.

Now make sure that you are in complete darkness, there should not be any light from city lights and nearby houses, that is, additional light sources should be completely excluded, only at night, without a single light source. The second point, the shooting of the starry sky should be carried out only before the moon leaves the horizon, otherwise additional source the light will not let you see the stars and just shine them.

From the camera settings, we have already talked about the maximum open aperture, which will allow you to see the stars in the photo as accurately as possible. In the camera, we set the shutter speed to at least 5 seconds and ISO at least 640, depending on the lens, we do all this on a tripod that is thoroughly installed on the ground in advance. If there is no tripod, which happened more than once in our case, then the usual hard fixed surface saves, on which you can put the camera with the lens up, the main thing is not to scratch the camera display.

In order for the shooting to be done with high quality, you need to eliminate the blurring of the photo when shooting with a long exposure, you need to install a cable with a control panel that has a shutter button that you press when you are ready to take pictures. But we get by more simple option, set a shooting delay of 10 seconds in the camera settings and move away, in 10 seconds the camera will stop shaking and stand still. We hope you understand what the delay is in question, with such a delay, they like to take pictures with the whole family, they set the delay in order to have time to gather everyone in front of the camera lens.

Excerptwhen photographing the starry sky

If you set a huge shutter speed, then the stars begin to look like stripes and the earth rotates correctly, if you set a short shutter speed, then the stars will be hard to see. How to capture that moment? Two ways: the trial and error method and the second method is the 600 rule. The first method of photographing the starry sky is clear to everyone, until you try all the options with the camera settings, you will not understand exactly what you need.

Let's talk about the second method in more detail, the 600 rule tells us about dividing the number 600 by the focal length of the lens. In our case, we used the Sigma AF 15mm f / 2.8 EX lens, which means that we divide 600 by 15mm, we get a shutter speed of 40 seconds. For cameras with a crop matrix, the final result must be divided by another 1.6 to get a shutter speed of 25 seconds.

What aperture to set when shooting

Most best option photographing the starry sky is the most open “hole” for your lens, the faster your lens, the better. In our case, we used the Sigma AF 15mm f / 2.8 EX lens, aperture of this lens is 2.8, aperture 1.8 - 2.8 is considered the ideal lens for shooting the starry sky.

What should be the focus?

Automatic focusing at night is unlikely to work at 100 percent, so without racking our brains on how to take a picture and without suffering, we switch to mechanical focusing, or otherwise called manual focus. We advise you to focus on the most extreme position to infinity focus. Tip on focal length, using the 15mm focal length as an example, we have already calculated a shutter speed of 40 seconds for full frame and 25 seconds for crop.

So this rule is valid up to a distance of 50mm, then the longer the focal length, the much shorter the shutter speed should be, plain language you can say this - the longer the focal length (from 50 mm ...), the closer the stars are to us, which means we don’t need a long shutter speed.

Options when shooting the night sky

  • it is best to use lenses 14 or 16 mm.,
  • set the ISO parameters to 200, then, if nothing is visible, then we will increase the value to ISO 400,
  • open the aperture from f4 to f5.6,
  • I recommend selecting the shutter speed in manual mode, the brightness should correspond to the author's idea. If the shutter speed is short (in most devices it is no more than 30 seconds), then we increase the ISO to 400 or more,
  • as for focusing, this is a problem at night, so we switch to manual focus mode.

How to shoot timelapsee

To begin with, let's talk about a program for gluing a huge amount of footage, in fact, such programs are very a large number of and almost all of them are free. But for a beginner in this business, we advise a simple and convenient program Startrails version 1.1. You can download it everywhere and for free, so we will not post the link.

Shooting a time-lapse is a very painstaking and long work that requires a huge amount of nerves and free time, it took us 2 nights to photograph the starry sky, during this time we were very exhausted, but you simply have to try this type of shooting, this is a very big step to professional photography, and a very exciting event awaits you.

For about 10 seconds of a video clip in timelapse mode, you will need to shoot 100 photos. Approximate camera settings that we used, while you shoot in complete darkness without a single light source interfering with you, are as follows: ISO 1000, focal length 15mm, maximum open diaphragm 2.8, shutter speed 30 seconds. Duration night work for a 10 second video about 50 minutes.

Now for some math, it takes a lot of time to shoot a 10 minute timelapse video. 1 second of video contains 24 frames, 60 seconds in a minute, 60 * 24 = 1440 frames, 10 minute video contains 14440 frames (1440 frames * 600 seconds). Taking each photo with a shutter speed of 30 seconds and pauses of 1 second, we get 31 seconds * 14440 frames = 447640 seconds or 124 hours of working time.

That is how much time it takes to shoot a high-quality video clip, but even more effort and money is spent on restoring equipment after such work. In conclusion, a few tips for photography. There must be no moon, shoot before it appears, otherwise you will get light and the stars will not be visible. Shoot away from city lights, the lights also illuminate everything and nothing will be visible.

Take a cloth with you to wipe the lens of the lens, it is very often humid at night and fogging is guaranteed to you. Further, when photographing for a long time, the matrix of any camera starts to heat up, as a result of which noise or light grainy dots appear in the photo, but some cameras have a noise reduction function that will save you. If there is no such function, give the camera a short break in work, otherwise the whole thing will go downhill.

Don't forget to experiment with the camera settings, choose a mountainous or forested area and you will end up with an unforgettable starry sky photo that will take first place among the photos taken in exciting journey together in the site team site

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