During the Corona pandemic, you notice that the skies have become clearer. The skies are clear due to a decrease in air pollution. When there is pollution, reflection by the particles affects the picture quality. Photographing the sky at night is always awesome. When taking night photographs, you have to maintain social distancing in the field.
The following are great tips that you can apply to get good photographs.
Finding a Standing Spot
Pollution of light destroys the beauty of photographs. The pollution menace may be from the bright lights in urban areas. Carrying out celestial photography becomes hard in such areas. For you to find the best locations that you can stand, you can check darksitefinder.com. The site provides suitable spots within your area. You also need to ensure that the weather is favorable. Clouds should not be present within a distance of 100 miles of the standing spot. You can find details of the cloud coverage within your area by using cleardarksky.com. Then identification of celestial bodies can be from Stellarium software. The software is available for iOS, desktop, and android. You also need a strong tripod to hold the camera. The carbon fiber tripods are the best as they hardly vibrate.
Buying or Renting Lenses and Cameras
For one to take low-light and long-exposure photographs, they need powerful DSLR cameras. The sensors of the high-end cameras are key for this type of photography. The cameras have a tech, the on-sensor dark current suppression. They help in minimizing the noise that the heat complications caused. Fast lenses work better when the surrounding environment is dim. It is because they have wide apertures that let more light into the camera. You can use telephoto lenses that have fixed focal lengths. The lens with this characteristic is the Sigma f/2.8; 300mm. Since the cameras and lenses are very expensive, you can opt to hire.
Proper Setting of the Camera
To get your gadget ready for photography, you need to go in-depth to the settings of the camera. Shooting in low lights requires certain settings. The adjustments will help prevent your camera from shaking. Set the camera to delay the shutter for about seconds after pressing the shutter button. The delay by the self-timer prevents the camera from wobbling when one presses it. The mirror lockup should be on. It assists in preventing the mirror in the body of the camera from flipping. The flipping makes the camera vibrate when one presses the shutter button. When the mirror lockup is on, your viewfinder ceases to function. You have to build the images you want to take by looking at the LCD screen of the camera.
It is also important to adjust the image setting too. Make sure that you take your shots Raw + JPEG or Raw. When shooting raw images, the images you get are not compressed; hence, your images keep the raw data. The ISO should be at 1600. The white balance should be at daylight. Both the focus and the shutter speed should be on manual mode. Then all you have to do is set the aperture of the lens.
Light Setting
The histogram display of the camera should be on. It assists in showing dark, and lights pixels present in an image. The peak of the graph needs to be at one third to one quarter beginning from the left side. It assists in maintaining the details present in the dark regions. Bright objects then do not blow out in the images. When you review the histogram, you get clues about your exposure level.
Combining Land and Sky
You can take separate shots of the celestial objects and the landscape. After taking the images, you can then combine them. One achieves this in post-production using software such as Adobe Photoshop. You can get the shots of the celestial body’s shots after proper tracking of the objects. Additionally, you can use the panorama or the mosaic method.
You do not have to start shooting the sky under dim settings. You can begin with basic photos. Take your time to master the art. With time you become an expert.
