Startrail photography center6/23/2023 If you do only a few minutes’ exposure, your trails will be very short. Take a test shot to check your focus, for both the sky and the foreground. Focusing makes the stars smaller and more defined. Also, while focusing you will see more and more faint stars coming in to view. The more you focus in, the smaller and defined the star will become. Now look at the size of the brightest star. Use the longest exposure setting (typically 30 or 60 seconds) and rise your ISO to make stars visible. You are better off switching to manual focus.įrame a bright star and use live view magnification to focus on it the best you can. First of all, you cannot rely on your camera’s auto focus. How To Focus at Nightįocusing at night is difficult. ISO 800 should be a good value to start with. You don’t need to use very high ISO either. Star Trail Photography Settingsįor star trails you do not need to use a particularly fast aperture: f4 or f/5.6 lenses will allow you to record plenty of stars.Īlso, using smaller apertures will result in a large enough depth of field, so that both the foreground and the stars will be in focus. Manual lenses such as the Samyang/Rokinon 12 f/2 NCS for micro four thirds cameras, Samyang 14 f/2.8 for Canon/Nikon/ Sony cameras and Samyang fisheye lenses are all good and relatively cheap lenses that are up to the task.įinally you need a sturdy tripod to support your camera and avoid camera shake. Even camera phones can be used with the proper app (e.g., Night Cap or Slow Shutter Cam).īecause you are doing landscape photography, you will benefit from using a wide angle or fisheye lens.Ĭlassic Nikon / Canon 18-55mm or Olympus/Panasonic 14-42 kit lenses are good enough to start with star trails photography. All cameras will do, as long as they can take long exposures. You do not need fancy gear to take star trails. Tripod: Manfrotto 055 XPROB and Olympus OM-D EM-10 micro four thirds camera. Once the sun came up, I took this picture of my gear set up high above a marsh field. If you want the stars to draw straight lines rising from the horizon into the sky, you have to photograph towards the East or West. You can check our SkyWatcher Star Adventurer review here. Apps for smartphones such as Stellarium and Sky Guide will use augmented reality to let you identify Polaris. If you are in the Northern Hemisphere and want the stars to draw concentric circles in the sky, you have to individuate and frame Polaris. To record star trails in your photography, all you need to do is take a long exposure of the sky. You can take advantage of the different motions of stars to photograph landscapes with different kinds of star trails. Knowing the way stars move is important for star trail photography. Note as Polaris remains almost fixed in the North sky. Simulated star trails when looking North (top) and East (bottom). To easily spot the different way stars move if you look in different directions, I created star trails from the two gifs above. This time they move in a rather straight line. Stars appear to move slightly differently if we look at the East sky. The gif shows how stars move in a circle around the North celestial pole, roughly indicated by Polaris, the North Star. This is a fast-forwarded image (stars do not move this fast), and you are looking at the sky toward the North (note the presence of the Polaris). To give you an idea of how stars move, I created the gif below with the free astronomy software Stellarium. This image shows how Earth rotates on its axis, which is tilted with respect to Earth’s orbit. When you glance at the stars, you might think that nothing up there is moving, but in reality the night sky is very dynamic.Įarth’s rotation around its axis is the main reason for the apparent motion of stars in the night sky. Star Trail Photography: Capturing Movement In The Night Sky
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