Any tips on taking photos of stars?

[julius]

Hi! last night I made an attempt at star photography but it proved to be fairly difficult with a broken tripod and no remote shutter. Ideally I would have shot in the bulb setting and controlled the exposure manually so I could have used a lower ISO but this wasn't possible unfortunately. I tried my slowest shutter 30s, widest aperture at ISO 800 and the image came out underexposed (was very dark). So I was forced to go to ISO 1600 at the widest aperture at 30s

There were a few hot pixels so I ended up converting to BW (which i prefer anyway). I'm not really happy with how it came out but I thought I'd post it anyway to see if anyone could give me some tips for next time.

I reckon next time try with film.

Shot at 30s, f4, ISO 1600

 

[RedDevilUK]

actually i like the picture, its great.

if i had to pick up on anything its the noise?

did you have the Long exp. NR switched on?

 

[julius]

Hey thanks for your comment, I'm glad you like it

Yeh, I had NR switched on and I also processed it in Neat Image which took away a lot of the noise.

 

[Funky]

you should set your camera on a table or something with a wide angle....better than a broken tripod eh? but yeah, you really need to shoot bulb because 30 seconds isnt log atall, i say iso 200 shutterspeed 2 hours. wooo

 

[julius]

you should set your camera on a table or something with a wide angle....better than a broken tripod eh? but yeah, you really need to shoot bulb because 30 seconds isnt log atall, i say iso 200 shutterspeed 2 hours. wooo

Haha yeh, the broken tripod isn't exactly ideal. As soon as I get the shutter I'm gonna give it another go using bulb. I wonder if a 2 hour exposure would give a short star trail effect Cheers for your comment

 

[gizmo2071]

Most people I know that shoot star trails shoot 15-30min exposures, but do a few after each other for maybe a few hours time span and then merge them together afterwards. This cuts down on the noise of a full 4hour exposure.
You really need a shutter release and steady tripod.
Keep it at iso100.
You'll have the same problems with film if you can't give a long enough exposure.

 

[Garbz]

You really only have 2 choices for this type of picture. Either a really long exposure to produce star trails, or a really long exposure with the camera tracking the sky.

Digital camera noise reduction does NOTHING against ISO noise. What it does do is eliminate dead pixels (this does not work 100%) and purple fringing. But you can not do long exposure photography on ISO1600 and expect a nice looking image.

Blub mode, shutter release, and ISO100 / wide open aperture is really the only way. Even then while it's possible to do exposures until your battery dies even after NR the resulting image is noisy. This is unfortunately something where you can achieve far better results on film.