How to shoot the starry sky?

If you want to say romance and shock, it must be better than the visual shock brought by the stars all over the sky! The sky is full of stars, like fireworks hanging in the sky, still emitting dim light and illuminating the whole world.

The most beautiful oath promises that under this starry sky, I believe that even if things change, you will not break your word. Even if one day the teenager is white-haired and beautiful, and I think of the starry sky I have seen together, I feel that time seems to go back, and our beauty has always been there.

However, how to keep this beautiful and romantic? After all, each of us is not a professional photographer and can't take any pictures of the starry sky that can only be seen online. However, you can master some skills, such as the following.

Below, Bian Xiao will give you some tips on shooting the starry sky!

Preparation before shooting

1. Shooting equipment

When shooting the starry sky, SLR and micro-single camera are preferred, and the lens should be wide-angle, and the wider the shooting range of the starry sky, the grandeur and vastness of the starry sky can be shown. We used a Canon 5D3+24-70mm lens for this shoot.

A tripod is necessary, because it takes a long time to shoot the starry sky, so you must use a tripod to keep the camera stable. At the same time, in order to avoid camera jitter when pressing the shutter, it is best to prepare a cable to release, otherwise the delayed self-timer function can be used instead.

It's best to prepare a flashlight for two reasons: ① It's dark, so it's inconvenient to set camera parameters and place a tripod, and a flashlight can help a lot; (2) flashlight also

It can fill the light and help focus, which I will talk about later. Anyway, you brought the right one.

Others: Shooting the starry sky in the middle of the night is quite cold even in summer, so pay attention to cold protection. In addition, shooting the starry sky is a protracted war, so be prepared psychologically.

2. Shooting location

It is best to stay away from the suburbs of the city, because it is difficult to see the stars in the city because of the influence of light pollution. In addition, we should consider the prospect when choosing the location, because the vast starry sky is just a beautiful background and needs a good prospect to set it off, such as buildings, mountains and trees.

3. Blasting time

In the choice of time, we need to pay attention to the following points: first, choose a sunny time to shoot, otherwise the clouds are too thick to see the stars on cloudy days; Second, it is suitable for shooting at night from one hour after sunset to one and a half hours before sunrise;

Third, because the light of the moon will also block the light of the stars, it is impossible to shoot at the fifteenth full moon of the lunar calendar, so it is best to shoot around the first month of the lunar calendar. If the light of the moon happens to be very strong that day, you should try to photograph the starry sky opposite the moon.

Finally, if you want to shoot the blue starry sky, you'd better shoot it on a moonlit night or about an hour and a half before sunrise.

Specific steps of starry sky shooting

1. Switch to M manual mode and set the shutter to 15~25s, F4 or larger aperture, and 800 or higher is 0.

Why is the shutter set at 15~25s? First of all, the light is too weak at night. In order to ensure sufficient light and normal exposure, a long shutter is necessary, but the shutter time should not be too long.

In order to avoid the trajectory blur caused by stars, there is a rule of 600, that is, the shutter speed must be less than 600 divided by the lens focal length. For example, for me, the focal length is 24mm, which means 600/24=25, so as long as the shutter does not exceed 25s, the trajectory can be avoided. This rule is for your reference.

Because the sky is dark, even if the shutter time is 25s, there may be underexposure. Therefore, it is necessary to set a larger aperture as much as possible and appropriately increase IS0. We set F4 aperture and IS0 to 800. Of course, this parameter is not fixed, and everyone should set it flexibly according to their own situation.

2. Keep the camera stable with a tripod.

Because the shutter speed of long exposure is 15~25s, hand-held shooting is bound to be blurred, so a tripod must be used to keep the camera stable.

At the same time, in order to avoid camera jitter when the shutter is pressed, it is best to use cable release, otherwise try to take a selfie with a delay.

3. Finding a suitable foreground is helpful for better composition.

It's not very beautiful to shoot the starry sky alone, but also need a good prospect to support villages, buildings, mountains, trees and so on.

4. The key point is: How to focus when shooting the starry sky?

The most distressing thing about shooting the starry sky is that it is often impossible to focus in the dark night sky, so how should we focus? We have summarized the following focusing methods, and everyone is seated according to their own situation.

When shooting the starry sky, focusing is an important factor to determine the success of shooting. Manual focusing must be used. The method is to automatically focus the stars and then switch to M manual focus.

Generally, in the case of live view (that is, screen view), we can find the distant light line to focus, and when the light spot becomes the smallest, the focus will be accurate.

The failure rate of using autofocus is very high, because the brightness of the stars is below -6EV, and the focusing ability of our camera is the strongest when it is -3EV or -2EV, so the effect cannot be guaranteed.

Stars don't need to be special when shooting the starry sky theme. We can find the foreground, let friends use headlights or flashlights to add some light to the foreground, take a real-time view, and zoom in and focus on the foreground.

The infinity mark on the camera lens is very unreliable on the zoom head, so some people say that if the focus is turned to infinity, it will easily fail.

If you don't believe me, you can use the live view function during the day to enlarge a distant scene ten times. When the focal length is 24mm and 70m, the scene will not be as clear!

5. Fill the foreground with a flashlight during exposure.

The starry sky effect after a long exposure, because the surrounding ambient light is too dark, even if it is exposed for 25 seconds for a long time, the foreground building is still dark.

At this time, we use flashlights to fill the foreground buildings. How to fill the light specifically? It's simple. When the camera is exposed for a long time, use the flashlight to "sweep" the building you want to illuminate several times. The length of the fill light directly determines the brightness of the foreground building.

Dragon Boat Festival is coming. When you travel, you might as well take advantage of such fine weather in June to see the romantic starry sky with friends or lovers, and then practice these theories to see if you can take fashionable starry sky photos!