Shooting Night pictures of stars (and stuff)

[Josh220]

Ok, I have a question about shooting stars. How do you focus?? I can't see anything through the view finder to reference for focus. My lens isn't marked for infinity and manually focusing for it in the dark is completely guess work (i.e. not really usable).

I find this to be one of the more difficult things when taking pictures at night. If possible I auto-focus on a distant streetlight or something along those lines, but otherwise I just find Venus or the brightest star I can see and manually focus it. I find it easier with some lenses than I do with others. You may want to max the ISO and take a quick test photo to see if it is okay.

Switch to manual focus, set your lens to infinity, shoot away. Nothing more than that is needed.

 

[brinda]

thank you for the lovely tutorial

 

[amethyst201190]

I must say,there are some various moment of the pictures that can't satisfy to see.This isn't exactly undesirable trails can be beautiful, and some of the people prefer them in their pictures.

 

[pollock]

But i guess sometime its quite difficult to captured thhese scenes in your cam, as i have tried for few times but, unfortunately unable to take clear view of it. And then i need to delete those. Have tried with different settings but in vain.

 

[MavChat]

Great stuff thanks! I love sitting on my balcony at night with my Fujifilm S4200. I know its not one of the greatest cameras but I have taken some very nice photo's of the moon. The stars still evade me but at the end of march when I go to the farm I will be spending much time out in the bush!

 

[Holman68]

This is why I am here...to take it all in and see what I can produce with the equipment I have. I love challenges and the information in this article was great to read. Thanks for posting!

 

[AlexanderB]

Awesome work! I tried to do long exposures but for whatever reason my pictures of the stars always came up overexposed if i did long exposures. Even if I boosted ISO to 100 and f to 22. Why is that? I even figured that i needed a density filter or something to prevent too much light coming in. And mind it, i was outside the town where it was absolutely dark and i didn't do exposures longer than 10 minutes.

Too much light in the night? That's news. There's something wrong here or you are from other planet where night is sunny like day.

 

[Wastures58]

what a lovely thread and excellent images