Experience of shooting starry sky in summer

Lead: Romantic and bright stars are always fascinating and yearning. Being able to record this beautiful starry sky with a camera is beautiful and dreamy because of the awe of the universe and the shock brought by natural wonders. Then, Gaihua creative contract photographer shared his experience in shooting the starry sky from the early preparation to the later stage in rum.

Feel the summer starry sky photography from Rum's starry sky photography

First, the preparation for shooting the starry sky:

First of all, you should have a SLR (good cameras, such as 5d2, 5d3, d700, d800, d4, 1dx, have good noise control ability and can get better picture quality). Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't take photos of 650d, d5 100 or d90, d7000 and other residual fuselage.

Yu Langmu's starry photography

Wide-angle or ultra-wide-angle lens with large aperture, or fisheye lens, or telephoto or medium-focus lens (used when shooting close-ups of snowy mountains and starry sky) (as mentioned above, there have been two successful shooting experiences with portal machine and standard dog head).

Cable release, several camera batteries (at least one spare battery), stable tripod (if you don't feel bad, you can put the camera in the mud or find a stone to fix it, so my friend did, which is highly recommended) flash (no need, flash is optional, you can use flash manual mode+flash test button for long exposure at night), dimmable flashlight or first class, warm and waterproof clothes, high-calorie food, gloves, and so on. Sleeping bag; Moisture-proof pad (optional), and most importantly, good figure!

Second, the starry sky shooting precautions

First of all, because it is dark at night, autofocus is basically disabled, and manual focus is basically selected until the lens is infinite. Personally, when the lens is manually focused to infinity, as shown in the following figure.

The picture shows that the focus should be aimed at infinity and not twisted to the end.

Secondly, many friends said that they couldn't find the location of the Milky Way, so they could use starwalk on the iphone to find it. Personally, I think this software is against the sky.

starwalk

starwalk

Of course, due to the location of the Milky Way, you can't see its large optical track belt in the northern hemisphere in winter, so if you want to shoot the Milky Way in winter, you'd better take a bath and sleep. It's already cold. I'm disappointed not to see it. In spring and summer, the Milky Way rises after midnight. In summer, the main orbit of the Milky Way can be seen after dark, and it stands up at about midnight. In autumn, the Milky Way basically stands after dark and sinks below the horizon after midnight.

Third, the shooting parameters of the starry sky

First of all, the wider the focal length of the lens, the longer your exposure time can be.

Personal exposure time is 25s and 30s. In this way, we can shoot in a relatively short time and ensure that there is enough time to adjust the composition and everything. Because I mainly shoot the starry sky on the plateau, I often encounter the situation that the milky way is vast five minutes ago and the clouds are densely covered five minutes later.

Select Iso according to darkness. 1600 is more reliable if shooting the Milky Way. I have used iso with a maximum of 8000, generally 2000-6400.

Of course, if you have a friend with a wide-angle lens of f 1.4, that's another matter. Aperture? If there is enough light or your lens aperture is large enough, it can be a little smaller. When most of the maximum aperture is only 2.8, don't hesitate to open it to the maximum. The depth of field of the maximum aperture under the super wide-angle lens is still sufficient. As for the image quality, what kind of image quality are you willing to lose because of the aperture? Or let the noise fly? (ps。 The larger the aperture, the more dark stars can be photographed. )

Rush into the sky

After talking about the basic shooting points, let's talk about our ideas. It's easy to shoot the starry sky (the weather is good enough to stay away from light pollution), but it's not that simple to shoot it for fun. Imagine that if you only take a galaxy, or choose a very ordinary or even bad prospect, the photos will be greatly discounted.

Taking people as the foreground will make photos much more interesting.

I tend to choose ancient buildings or natural landscapes as the foreground. If there is no prospect, I will go into battle myself and use people as the foreground, so the photos will be much more interesting.

Fourth, fill the foreground in starry sky photography.

Borrowed street lamps fill my foreground.

Then there is the foreground light, because there is a street lamp next to the temple, so I borrowed it to fill my foreground, as shown above.

Flash manual flash fill light

Where there is no artificial light at all, I fill it myself. The flash mentioned above is a manual fill light, and the following picture is a headlight fill light.

Illuminate with headlights

Fill the foreground with appropriate light to make the photos more moving and attractive.

As shown in the picture below, I lit up the whole road with the headlights of a passing motorcycle and took an interesting motorcycle trail.

The headlights of the motorcycle filled the whole road.

As for the snow-capped mountain in Figure 8, I make up the light by moonlight that is about to set. By the way, the exposure time should not be too long when shooting in the middle telephoto segment, so it is not recommended to use it in the new moon, because the scenery to be shot in the middle telephoto segment is generally far away from us, so it is not convenient to fill the light, so we have to rely on moonlight to fill the light. At the same time, because the medium telephoto shooting can't be exposed for too long, otherwise it will drag the track. Therefore, it is suggested that moonlight should be used as natural supplementary light.

Verb (abbreviation for verb) Shooting the orbit of a star.

The exposure is divided into several times and finally superimposed.

The shooting of the star orbit can adopt low sensitivity, single exposure for a long time, or multiple superposition (30s-60s x 120+ can get better results), but it is not advisable to use too high sensitivity when shooting the star orbit, at most, 1600, otherwise the consequences will be unimaginable after too many stars are superimposed. As shown in the above figure, it is exposed in stages and finally formed by superposition.

Sixth, the post-production of starry sky.

Lr+ps can be mixed in the later stage of starry sky. raw is the best choice for shooting, and there is more room for noise reduction in the later stage.

The general process is after entering lr; Tone adjustment-sharpness adjustment-highlight-shadow-white level-black level-curve highlight-bright level-dark level-shadow-lens correction-reduce noise (not too much)-export to ps.

After entering lr

Color reaction

Import ps for adjustment.

In ps, you can use dfine of nik to reduce noise, and at the same time, you can fine-tune and modify the picture. You can use the superposition function in startrails or ps to superimpose the star orbit, so I won't go into details here. It's all available online (in most cases, I still choose an exposure, which can exercise my control over light more than light).