quick reply needed! night photography! help!

[timputtick]

i've never taken photos after sunset but im about to try. it's clear sky's which means stars on a lake, i'm thinking about a long shutter of up to a minute but not sure about iso etc... if anybody has any tips and tricks please let me know! thanks

 

[tirediron]

What camera/lens combination? In general, keep your ISO fairly low. Night/dark shots will tend to be noisy due to under-exposed regions and the lower the ISO, the more you mitigate that. Select a medium aperture (f8/f11) and with the camera on a tripod, and preferably using a remote release (or, failing that, self-timer) to avoid shake, let it go. The night will last a few hours, so you've got lots of time. I doubt that you will see too much from a one minute star shot, BUT it's a good starting point. Remember that as your exposures (if they do) get longer, your sensor will heat up which may induce further noise into your images.

 

[analog.universe]

Shooting a landscape and including the stars is a balance between a long shutter and the movement of the stars themselves. The rule of thumb is that you can leave the shutter open for (600 / effective focal length) seconds, before the points become trails. So if you were using a 24mm lens on a full frame camera, you could use a 25 second shutter. Getting the stars to show up in such a short amount of time usually means shooting with the lens wide open and at a midrange ISO, which will put your equipment to the test. I've shot stars effectively with a 15 second shutter, at 28mm f/1.8, and ISO 800. How fast your lens is, and how well your camera performs at high ISO will be the limiting factors.

If you're not concerned with freezing the stars' motion, and instead want to take star trail shots, the idea is to leave the shutter open as long as possible (or even stack multiple long exposures (to cut down on noise and sensor heat)). Star trails are much less equipment intensive than point stars. You can stop down to f/4 or f/5.6 for sharpness, and shoot at base ISO. Then just expose for as long as possible, it will take some experimenting to determine how long your camera can go before noise becomes a problem. Be sure to enable "long exposure noise reduction", or equivalent.