UKC

In reply to Mr Fuller:

Not familiar with that model, but when I'm shooting stars with my d7000 I use live view.

I find the brightest star I can and get it into rough focus, then I zoom the live view in and carefully get it as sharp as I can. It's easiest to do this in stages, but at the maximum zoom level you should easily be able to see individual pixels and get the image as good as your lens will allow.

In reply to Mr Fuller:

From my experience of star shooting - much more difficult in the days of film – I'd say you did indeed get it wrong with an !SO of 800 ... ignoring one of the greatest benefits of modern digital photography. You are right: even on v wide-angle shots of the stars you are in trouble with exposures of longer than about 25 seconds IIRC. Also, for best results, you should be using a fixed lens rather than a zoom, and stopping down to at least f5.6 or f8.

Re. tent. Any painting with a torch will look phoney. Just go for a low light from inside the tent.
Re. depth of field. You need to be quite a long way from the tent (mid distance). You can always crop the shot later if your original is of high enough quality - which should be your first aim. Quality. With this type of shot you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

In reply to Mr Fuller:
You first picture looks great to me, but the stars are trailing slightly.

If you have a manual focus lens, they're normally (but not always) best set right to the end stop. Some lenses, especially zooms, might be a wee bit out.
Alternatively if you have an auto focus lens, make it focus on something "far away" like a distant light then click the focus over to manual and don't touch it.
If you have a telephoto lens, that may be difficult to focus accurately as "infinity" may need to be several hundred meters away.

Live view (on a remote screen to avoid shaking the tripod) is the ultimate solution. Eg using Nikon camera control pro or similar on a laptop.

The stars will trail during the exposure unless tracked, so maximum exposure is limited. 35mm goes for about 20 seconds, 24mm for perhaps 30 and 300mm for 0.5seconds. Ish!

Set your camera on a tripod and use a remote trigger or timer. Don't walk near the camera whilst the exposure is taking place as the vibrations may disturb the image. Even a gentle breeze may spoil the image.

It can be surprisingly tricky to get good images, and be aware that a star field with its myriad point sources is a very hard test of a lens, and the edge stars may end up being slightly misshapen.

Finally, infrared from the stars (particularly the bright ones) may start to register on the camera and show halos round the stars. The infrared filter in cameras is not perfect and a lens will have different focus points for visible light and infrared unless it is a very expensive apochromat.

Hoppy

In reply to richard_hopkins:

In the old days of very high quality handmade lenses, such as those made by Zeiss for the Hasselblad, infinity was never at the end stop. Even then, it was always quite a good practise for shots that you wanted to be in focus from middle, or even far, distance to infinity that you set the lens to very, very slight 'short infinity'. Assuming you were able to stop down at all.

In reply to Mr Fuller:

Buy this.

http://craftandvision.com/products/nightscape

money well spent.

Focus stacking may give you more control for the tent and stars shot and flexibility for exposure.

I used the 500 rule and bracketed and found that instead of the recommended 36 second, 20 seconds was the better for sharp pinpoint stars.

Alex.

In reply to Mr Fuller:
You could treat yourself to a new toy to help with your star shots.

A Triggertrap.
http://triggertrap.com/

I've only used mine so far with Time-lapse photography but it should help with star shots too.

I have the same camera as your good self and can confirm that photographing stuff in the dark is like knitting fog. Personally I'd use a tripod and keep the ISO as low as possible to counter the effects of noise and camera shake. So far my night time achievements have only been limited to fireworks and night-time urban scenes but I would like to take a pop at night sky's too.

the best bet is to focus on something as far away as possible and then turn off the auto-focus on your lens. If you are using a tripod, then turn of the image stabilising as well for even less potential vibration in your shot. Beyond that I'm as much in the dark as you.

In reply to Mr Fuller:

some tips here: http://www.fotovue.com/night-photography/

In reply to Mr Fuller:

Thanks all, there's loads of helpful stuff there. It sounds like if I crank the ISO a bit to keep exposure times down, try using live view or focussing on something bright, and then getting some decent foreground I might have a decent shot. I've a remote already but will work on getting better stability.

I'm on expedition next year where I will probably get a fair bit of time to try this sort of thing and if my budget can stretch I'll see if I can buy/hire a 14 mm lens as that sounds like it'll make a difference too.

Mick, that must be your latest project? Looks cool!

In reply to Mr Fuller:

and Ice Nine's....

In reply to Michael Ryan:

Ah yes, I heard from Alan at Outdoor that you had a project on the go with him. Not a bad photographer to get involved!

In reply to Mr Fuller:


If you want to go wide and don't want to break the bank then the tokina 11-16 is a good option for APS-C cameras. It has a bit of distortion but is fast and v sharp for the price.

In reply to Mr Fuller:

Are you aware of the bahtinov focussing mask?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahtinov_mask

http://www.365astronomy.com/365astronomy-bahtinov-focusing-mask-65100mm-p-4...

In reply to mikehike:

I have used those with telescopes, but never found them useful with an SLR and standard lenses. The trouble is that you would be doing well to see a star at all in the average SLR viewfinder, and if you use the live view then you can just zoom in and pixel peep anyway.