Star photography — a primer

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”, Oscar Wilde

Mt Rainier near Seattle WA

The Universal Experience

One of the great joys in life is to get outdoors, lie on your back and look up at the stars. Regardless of age, location, or wealth, I like to believe that everyone has done this at some point in their lives and can relate the beauty of staring up in the vastness of the night sky.

Everyone gets their own personal experience from this — but there’s a deep instinctive reaction to be in awe in the face of such scale. Children looking up at the night sky create stories. Young adults bond and form friendships together. Ancient people created their gods. This is the one experience where we all get the same view, regardless of our place on Earth. A universal experience, if you will.

I’ve always felt drawn to the emptiness of places, but periods in my life have resulted in me exploring other paths. As I traveled and worked in London and Singapore, two densely populated urban areas, a near-decade passed without me staring into the stars at night. I saw the night sky of course, but the skies in the cities are different. Ambient light from roads, cars and houses pollutes the darkness. It’s still beautiful — but not the kind of beauty that can cause you to skip a breath.

It wasn’t until I came to the US and started road tripping into areas further and further away from populated cities, that I realized so much time had passed. Walking out at night into the freezing cold air near Moab, Utah (population 5,000) for the first time, I tipped my head back and it allcame back to me.

This is where I started to combine my love of empty spaces, with photography — because as it turns out, night photography is both very possible and incredibly rewarding. While nothing can do justice to really being there, recent advances in photo gear have made it possible to capture views that were impossible even 10 years ago.

Here’s a photo at Arches National Park I took on a Christmas road trip in 2013.

The strip of cloudy stars you see streaking across the photo is the Milky Way, which you can see on very dark nights.

Here’s another at Monument Valley just after sun down.

And one while camping in the freezing conditions of winter at Blanding, UT. Utah is definitely a favorite spot for me — given its the large number of Dark Sky Preserves.

This was a shot while traveling along the Icefields Parkway between Jasper and Banff in Canada, where we were lucky enough to happen upon the Northern Lights.

If you’re excited by the idea of seeing and capturing views like this, read on — as I’ll attempt to give a quick overview of what you’ll need, and how to do it.

Gear you’ll need

The wonderful thing about star photography is that due to advances in sensor technology (which now handle long exposure and high ISO noise) star photography is very accessible. Here’s a quick overview of the kit you’ll need:

• A good, modern, interchangeable lens camera. This could be a DSLR from Nikon / Canon (e.g. Nikon D5500 or a Canon Rebel) or a mirrorless camera from Fuji, Olympus, Sony or Panasonic. Brand doesn’t matter as much as the fact that it has a modern sensor made in the last couple of years. This will ensure that it has the low light capability which we’ll want.
• A wide angle lens. If you have full frame camera, you’ll want something at least as wide as 24mm. If you don’t know what full frame is, then you likely have a 1.5x crop. This means you’ll want a lens which is at least as wide as 16mm. If you have Panasonic or Olympus, you have a 2x crop and you’ll need at least 12mm. You want your lens to be fast (that is, a wide aperture). Ideally at f2.8 or faster. You can still do this with kit lenses, but the results won’t be as good.
• A good tripod and ballhead. Manfrotto and Gitzo are two of the most popular brands in the tripod game but you can find cheaper also. A ballhead is the swively thing that mounts to your tripod and you connect your camera to. Again, you can live without this but it becomes way less convenient.
• A camera plate. This is screws into your camera and then attaches to the ballhead for quick release. This solves you having to screw your camera in and out of the tripod each time.
• Adobe Lightroom or some similar software — to process your photos

Here’s what my gear looks like for night sky photography:

• Fuji X-Pro2 camera. I shoot with Fuji because I love mirrorless for its compactness / weight saving gains and also how it handles color noise.
• Fuji 14mm f2.8 lens. Wide, fast, high quality.
• Gitzo GT1542T tripod. Carbon fiber legs, super light, built to last forever.
• Markins Q3 ballhead. There are many great ballheads out there but I ended up going Markins. I also got my camera plate from them too.

There’s other non-camera gear that is useful too:

• A LED torch with adjustable brightness. To help you get around, and if you want to try light painting (we’ll get to this later)
• Warm clothes. Layering is an essential tactic to keeping warming when it’s cold.
• Hand warmth. Especially important as the hands are often the thing that “fails first” when it’s very cold out operating camera gear. My technique now is to use lighter gloves that I can operate my camera with rather than very thick gloves that I have to keep taking off. I then supplement that by putting them in pockets closer to my body as much as possible. I plan to buy two of these for my next adventure which I think will help too.
• A blanket. To sit / lie on. Don’t underestimate how much the ground can sap your heat. My next purchase will be a fancy Pendleton blanket.
• A chair (or two). Camping chairs are wonderful for sitting back and watching the sky — especially if you’re with friends. They keep you off the ground if it’s cold too.
• A dog. Dog’s make wonderful companions in almost any situation and going out to watch the night sky with them is no exception. Go adopt one :)

Crater Lake National Park, Oregon

Point and click

Once of the nice things about sky photography, is that a lot of the hard work is in the preparation and getting to your location. Once you’ve got the gear and your location staked out, it’s mostly a matter of making sure you have the right settings. When you become competent at that (mostly through practice), it’s not much harder than pointing and shooting. The key is making sure you use the right settings. This will enable you to get a photo that is well exposed (that is the stars are bright) which requires using fairly high ISO and a long shutter speed. However, you can’t use a shutter speed that is so long that you start to see star trails. Yes, the somewhat mind blowing thing about star photography is that once you get above a shutter exposure of 30 seconds or so, you can actually record the rotation of the earth and the stars will become blurry.

Here’s the simple rule of thumb I use which you can adjust if you have gear similar to mine (that is, a full frame equivalent lens of 21mm):

• Mode: Manual (it’s easy if you just shoot in manual mode for this)
• Focal length: 21mm (in my case I don’t have a choice, but you want this to be as wide as possible)
• Aperture: f2.8
• ISO: Take your camera off auto mode and set it to ISO 1600 or so
• Shutter speed: Usually, about 20s-30s on a dark night will create a well exposed photo at the above settings

Notice that the exposure time is quite long. This is why you need a good tripod. If your lens isn’t as “fast” as f2.8, you just adjust accordingly. So for example, these might be your settings for a 21mm f/4 lens:

Aperture: f4

ISO: 3200

Shutter speed: 30s

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you can either learn about the trade off between shutter speed, aperture and ISO. Or just set your camera to ISO 1600, set the aperture to be as wide as possible (a small number — f4 is “wider” than f8) and just use trial and error. Take a photo, see if it looks good and then change the shutter speed accordingly.

Like many aspects of photography, practice really does make perfect. The advantage of star photography is that you have time on your side. Those stars aren’t going anywhere.

Light painting

Once you get comfortable with the above techniques, you can play with some more advanced concepts such as “light painting”. I won’t go into this in too much depth here but I’ll give an idea of what’s possible. If you look closely at the photos above (such as the Monument Valley photo), you’ll notice that the rocks appear as silhouettes. This is because they’re not lit from the foreground. However, for objects up close you can alter that by “painting” them with a torch. Once you press the shutter, you shine a torch onto the area you want to light, and move it around evenly. The reflection from the light is then exposed on the camera’s sensor and will show up in the resulting photo. It takes of trial end error to begin with as some areas tend to be under of over exposed, but after a while you get the hang of it. Here’s an example at Arches National Park.

Tips

A few additional tips:

• Wait till at least an hour or two after sunset. Even if you can’t see much light in the sky, a lot can still show up on your camera
• The best time of the month to photograph is when there’s a new moon. It’s amazing how much ambient light can be created in the sky by a full or even half moon. Here’s an example at Joshua Tree National Park when the moon was out. I still like the picture but it looks as if it was taken at dusk. It was actually taken 2 hours after sunset but the moon was so bright it lit up the landscape and washed out the sky.

Joshua Tree National Park

• Check online resources. Such as http://darksky.org/idsp/finder/ which help you find info about how dark the skies are around you.
• Take spare batteries for your camera. The cold saps their charge must faster than normal so you’ll want plenty of backups. Keep them in your pockets closer to your body where it’s warmer.
• Stay safe. A lot of the places above (and ones you’ll want to go to) are out of the cell phone coverage. Let someone know where you’re going, don’t take unnecessary risks venturing too far off road, be aware of potential wildlife, etc.
• Finally, be respectful. These areas are some of the most beautiful and cherished on this continent. Help preserve their beauty and serenity.

I hope this mini guide is of use and helps you take a few adventures of your own. As you explore, remember this is as much about the experience as it is about the photos. Don’t get so focused on the end result that you miss out on the original goal — to simply stare up at the sky and be awed.