How to shoot a star?

Ordinary photography is very simple. -Right? Pick up your camera, aim it in the direction you are interested in and press the shutter button. However, photography has many levels, and I believe many of you know the basics.

Today I'm going to focus on a more advanced thing, shooting all over the sky, which is celestial photography.

For astrophotography, you will deeply study some manual controls of cameras, such as shutter speed, aperture, ISO control and so on. I also strongly recommend shooting at night with RAW, because it gives you more control when editing the final image. If you are not sure what RAW is and why it is important, I have written something about RAW photography here.

Let's start looking at what you need.

Tripod-We will handle the exposure in dozens of seconds. I don't care who you are. You need something to stabilize your camera.

Manually controlled camera-Manual control of ISO and shutter speed is very important for shooting stars.

Large aperture lens-you need a lot of light, and f /2.8 seems to be the butter area in astrophotography. Combining this super wide-angle lens with the depth of field is not a problem.

With these three pieces of equipment, you have a good start, of course, there are more to add, I believe you can discuss in the comments below.

Position, position, position

Now, it is not enough to just take away all the equipment. You need to find a suitable place to shoot the night sky. Light pollution is a serious problem in astrophotography. If you are near any big city, it takes at least an hour to escape from the lights.

I live outside Boston, Massachusetts, and I am almost locked in one of the least polluted areas in New England in the southern United States.

However, as shown in the following figure, even a small town with only 30,000 people and more than ten miles away will still cause some obstructive light pollution.

In addition to finding a suitable location on the earth, you also need to know the locations of various stars and constellations in order to take pictures. I use an application called starwalk to track this information for my iPhone and locate the core of the Milky Way, which may be great when taking photos.

basic settings

When shooting these tiny pinholes, you need as much light as possible to hit your sensor. Therefore, it is very important to use a combination of high ISO, large aperture and long shutter speed.

For the above photo of kayak under the starry sky, I used the aperture of 1250 f /2.8, with a 30-second exposure. You will notice that at the lower right of the photo, a city has about 30 minutes of light pollution.

One thing to minimize light pollution is to find problems in time. In order to do this, I usually use the ridiculously high ISO (usually the highest ISO that my camera will reach) to shoot continuously, just to limit the exposure time of each shot. These shots will not be used in the final process, but let me know where it is forbidden.

As far as exposure time is concerned, the shorter the better, otherwise the earth's rotation will eventually move among stars. For example, my kayak photo was taken in 30 seconds. It's actually a little long. If you look carefully, you can see some movements in the starry sky.

Now, don't get me wrong, this may be a very cool photography style, and it is often called the star who creates the lens like the following.

Here is a dPS about meteors. If you are interested in creating such photos, you should check more information.

Process photos

Processing these night sky photos may be a bit scary, because they don't look like it at first. As I mentioned above, if your camera provides RAW format, I strongly recommend that you shoot in RAW format, because this will allow you to do more things in this step.

For the close-up at the top of this article, I divided the photo into two areas, namely the sky and the foreground. I use LR4' s adjustment tool to selectively adjust each area until I am satisfied with the final result.

If you are interested, you might as well find a chance to try. Then you can share the communication in the comments below (* _ _ *).