It was once a genre that seemed open to only a few with specialized equipment and skill, but digital photography has made it possible for just about everyone to capture the heavens for themselves.
Tools of the Trade: To get started, all you need is a camera that can be adjusted manually (all-auto cameras do not work for most nighttime celestial sights), a fast normal or wide-angle lens (f/2.8 or faster) and a solid tripod and head. That’s it! The gear to which I’ve linked above are my current workhorses for night sky shooting, but there are many other quality choices, so I encourage you to evaluate your needs and reach your own conclusions.
And don’t forget a flashlight. I prefer using a headlamp with red LEDs to preserve night vision, but a white light will also be useful to help you see on the way to and from your shooting location.
Setting Up: Once you’ve found a good site, make sure your tripod is locked down firmly before attaching the camera.
Next you must turn off your auto-focus mechanism and disable your strobe and image stabilization switch (IS on Canon and VR on Nikon, for example) any time your camera is on a tripod.
Focus: You will need to manually focus your lens to infinity. Do not trust the infinity symbol (∞) on the lens, especially if you’ve got an auto focus lens. You can use your viewfinder or live-view to focus on a very distant subject in the daytime or the moon at night. If neither of those is possible, find a medium-bright star in the sky and focus on that. Once your focus is set, use gaffer’s tape (or painter’s tape, for example) to tape the focus barrel down so that it won’t move.
Compose: Now you’re ready to compose the scene… easier said than done in the dark. Use your flashlight to illuminate the scene while you compose the shot, or you can adjust your composition based on the appearance of your first test shots.
Once you’re happy with the composition, level the camera. Some cameras have an electronic leveler built in, but if yours doesn’t, you can get an inexpensive bubble level that attaches to your camera’s hotshoe.
Adjust the settings: Now you’ll be faced with a profound question: what settings should I use? Unfortunately, there is no single answer, since much depends on the subject, the lighting, the equipment and how you want your image to appear.
My recommendation is to experiment. Choose a starting aperture, shutter speed and ISO and take an exposure. Now evaluate the image on your camera’s LCD screen and make adjustments to the settings and reshoot until the image appears the way you want.
For a dark and moonless starry sky you may find that a good starting point is 15 seconds at f/2.8 with an ISO of 1600. Obviously shots that contain the moon or brightly lit landscapes will require different starting points, so don’t be afraid to experiment.
Use your histogram—yes, even at night: It’s impossible to determine if your night sky shot is properly exposed by looking at the image on the LCD screen. In fact, often these images will appear quite dark on the screen, and you’ll be tempted to adjust settings to brighten them. The histogram provides the only reliable way to determine proper exposure; this is your best friend on the camera!
The data on the histogram will naturally lie mostly on the left side—it is a dark scene, after all—but you don’t want it to be pegged against the left wall. If it is, that means that you’re losing shadow detail. Adjust your settings to bring the data off of the left wall and you’ll have a sufficiently exposed image.
A whole universe to shoot: Few photographers pay much attention to the night sky, but it’s filled with wonderful subjects to shoot.
In addition to stars and constellations, there’s also the moon in all its phases, the Milky Way, the zodiacal light, clouds (especially illuminated by moonlight), meteor showers, northern lights, satellites and much more.
Just like any other area of photography, the key to getting the great shots is to understand your subject and be able to anticipate its behavior. It’s frustrating to head out to photograph the Milky Way during the early hours of a beautiful spring night only to learn that the Milky Way is nowhere to be found!
The night sky changes constantly and, fortunately, much of what appears there can be predicted in advance. Get some planetarium software for your computer and play around with it to see what will be available to your camera before heading out into the darkness.
Image processing: You may think that once you get home and download your images your job is done. Not so fast… there’s a matter of processing the images to bring out the best in them.
There is much software out there to do this, of course, but I’ve found that Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop allow me to transform the rather bland files produced by a camera into night sky images that are truly stunning to the eye.
My caution to you is to be gentle with image processing. Its purpose is to bring out the detail and “feeling” in the photos, not to change the photos into something totally unrelated to reality. A little goes a long way.
Get shooting! Spend some time under the stars with your camera and I think you’ll agree there are few pastimes that are more relaxing, rewarding and fun. Take your time, enjoy the process, and experiment. With the right gear, preparation and effort you’ll soon be creating spectacular celestial portraits for yourself!
