Beginner's guide to star photography

A few years ago, I was scuba diving in the Maldives. It was a shark-watching morning dive, canvas prints and the plan was to get up at about four in the morning, take a boat out, and enter the water at six with the newly bright morning light. I climbed out of bed in a daze, dragging my feet along the slightly damp wooden walkway to the dock. Inadvertently, I looked up at the sky.

On that day, before I had the chance to see the famous diving spot of sharks in Maldives, I was shocked by another beautiful scene, canvas printing online which was the brilliant and magnificent starry sky that I had never seen before, with the Milky Way shining brightly and high overhead. In the past two years, I have gradually explored some ways to shoot the stars. I would like to share with you here. I hope you can also record your own stars.

Taken steps

1. Choose a solid place to place your tripod firmly. In order to take clear pictures of the Milky Way and stars, you must first make sure that your camera does not move. Note that some of the ground is not as solid as you might think, such as muddy ground or sand, large canvas printing which can cause the tripod to sink very slowly.

2. Adjust your camera to M (manual), turn off the lens stabilizer (if you have one), and turn off any built-in noise reduction features (usually high ISO noise reduction and long exposure noise reduction, which can be found in your camera Settings menu).

3. Switch your lens to manual focus mode and rotate the focus ring until the scale indicates infinity. Note that focusing to infinity does not rotate your focusing ring to the end, usually the infinity symbol rotates back a little bit more than the end of the rotation.

4. There's usually nothing wrong with setting your camera aperture to maximum (or minimum), but if the weather is perfect and your aperture is large enough (like 1.2 or 1.4), you can rewind one gear.

5. Select shutter speed based on the focal length of your camera. For a 24mm lens, I recommend limiting the exposure time to less than 15 seconds in order not to create significant trailing shadows in the final image due to the movement of stars. If you have a lens with a 16mm or wider Angle, try extending the exposure time to 20 seconds or more, but generally no longer than 30 seconds.

6. Select ISO according to the amount of exposure required. You can use different ISO values to try out a few shots, preview the effect, if the preview is clearly visible stars, it will be fine. The recommended range is ISO1600 to ISO6400. Too low ISO will not allow full exposure of stars, and too high ISO will cause too much noise. I above the Maldives under the Milky Way walker this picture shooting parameters: ISO6400, aperture F2.8, shutter 13 seconds, for your reference.

7. Align yourself with the star you want to photograph, lock the tripod and the knob on the head, and press the shutter.

Advanced shooting tips

Now that you have a picture of the stars, congratulations on your mission! But you still feel a little dissatisfied? The following tips may help you.

1. Select suitable ground landscape. The magnificent starry sky can only show its beauty in proportion to the suitable landscape. Truly moving starry sky photography works, the ground landscape is the soul of it. Landscapes can be natural mountains, lakes, trees, grasslands, man-made buildings, or even people.

The difficulty of shooting the ground scene and the starry sky at the same time lies in the control of the light ratio -- either the ground scene is not illuminated and under-exposed into a piece, or the ground scene itself has a light source which causes over-exposure into a piece of white. For the landscape that is not bright enough without lighting, we need to fill in the light. For the natural landscape with large mountains and lakes, we can only resort to moonlight, as mentioned above. Small grass, trees, rocks and figures can be filled by a flashlight. For the landscape is too bright, you need to use an inverted gradient mirror or shake the black card way to reduce the exposure of the landscape. Using a combination of the above methods, including the surround exposure synthesis or HDR, can help you get more done. The following photo borrows landscape lights as landscape lighting, with the upper and lower parts exposed separately.

2. Panoramic Mosaic

Milky Way across the sky, and constrained by wide-angle lens range, it is hard to picture the whole galaxy income, this time with camera filming the parts of the galaxy, respectively, to ensure that the following 2 pieces of more than 40% overlap, come back later to use Photoshop or other stitching a panorama stitching software (well, if you are using Photoshop CC, then click on the menu file - automatically - photo merge), this method allows you to take the famous galaxy arch bridge. The above image of walker under the Maldives galaxy was taken with the camera horizontally and then assembled into four vertical images.

The noise reduction method

Now that you've got a beautiful picture of the sky, it's all right to show it off. If you are patient enough to pursue perfection, read on. When you zoom in on your starry sky shot to 100%, do you notice a lot of tiny spots in the dark with different shades of color? These little dots are called noise, and they make the image look rough and dirty and affect the quality of the picture. Noise reduction is a method to reduce the influence of noise points. Before noise reduction, we first briefly understand the types of noise points.

Fixed noise point: the bad point of the camera sensor, the inherent noise point produced by the camera at a specific temperature, etc., are reflected in the photo, that is, every photo has a noise point of fixed color brightness at a fixed position.

Random noise: the noise of color of random position and brightness generated by high is signal amplification and thermal noise.

For noise reduction, we have to slightly modify the following the final step in the filming process: for every one of the stars in shooting (after if you want to undertake a panoramic Mosaic, including your for joining together of each part of the sky), don't just shoot a piece, and to adopt the method of the following pictures: camera position and parameters are fixed, to the same location filming 10 consecutive (these pictures, called light field), at this time if there is a timed shutter release, use the function of automatic time-lapse will be very convenient, if not, just counting the shutter. Immediately after taking 10 shots, close the lens cover, with the ISO aperture shutter and all other parameters unchanged, acrylic prints australia and take 5 photos of the full black (these photos are called dark field). Then follow this procedure for each star image.