Star Photography Tips Beginner's Guide to Star Photography for Novice Photographers

1. Choose a solid place and put your tripod firmly. In order to take clear pictures of the Milky Way and the stars, you must first make sure that your camera is still. Note that some ground is not as solid as you think, such as muddy ground or beach, which will cause the tripod to sink very slowly. If the equipment must be installed in these places, please insert the tripod into the ground.

2. Turn your camera to M gear (manual gear), turn off the lens anti-shake stabilizer (if any), and turn off all noise reduction functions of the camera (usually high ISO noise reduction and long exposure noise reduction, which can be found in your camera setting menu).

3. Switch the lens to manual focusing mode and rotate the focusing ring to infinity indicated by the scale line (i.e. this symbol ∞). Note that focusing on infinity does not mean turning your focus ring to the end. Usually, the infinite symbol is rotated back a little bit from the bottom position.

It is no problem to turn the aperture of your camera to the maximum (the aperture value is the minimum). If the weather is excellent and your aperture is large enough (for example, 1.2, 1.4), you can also take back one gear.

5. Select the shutter speed according to the focal length of the camera. For a 24mm lens, the exposure time should be controlled within 15 seconds in order not to cause obvious trailing afterimage in the final photo due to the movement of stars. If you have a wide-angle lens above 16mm, you can try to extend the exposure time to 20 seconds or even longer, but generally it should not exceed 30 seconds.

6. Select ISO according to the required exposure. You can take several photos with different ISO values and preview the effect. If the starry sky is clearly visible in the preview, there is no problem. Usually the recommended voyage is from ISO 1600 to ISO6400. Too low ISO can't completely expose the starry sky, while too high ISO will cause too much noise.

7. Aim at the starry sky you want to shoot, lock the knobs on the tripod and pan/tilt, and press the shutter. It's over.