7 Astrophotography Tips for Complete Beginners

if you are brand new to astro photography and you want to get started this video may help you this is seven astro photography tips for complete beginners so no telescope needed no star tracker anything like that just basic gear so a dslr or mirrorless camera and lens and a tripod that's all you need for this so before we get into it i'll just show you what i'm working with here and it's just a canon 7d mark ii dslr camera with the canon 24 to 105 millimeter zoom lens on it and then i've got a ball head and it's on a very sturdy tripod so that's very important a setup like this might be something that you already own or you're kind of working towards but you'll need that dslr camera or mirrorless with that full manual control no point-and-shoot cameras and again before we get into the specifics the reason you want a full manual camera like a dslr is to have that control over your exposures and the camera settings and the lens controls all those things are really important for astrophotography because we're taking pictures at night and we want to let in as much light as possible generally and more importantly we want to be able to control the amount of light that we let in okay so the first astrophotography tip i have is to set yourself up for success in terms of when you image your location and the timing of it all so you want to shoot during the new moon phase or the three days leading up to or after the new moon so you don't have that bright moon light in the sky if you're taking photos of the moon of course that changes but what i'm talking about is nightscape style images where you want to capture stars and maybe a few deep sky objects as well so new moon phase and then also you want it to be clear conditions so some nights where it's just kind of iffy and there's a few clouds rolling in and out if you're going to spend the time to do a real imaging session make sure that it's going to be clear all night long because it's going to take longer to get things set up than you think and to get everything running right and then for the clouds to roll in is a huge pain so you don't want that either the other thing we often deal with of course is light pollution so you may be able to take your photos from the backyard but chances are you'll have to get in the car and drive somewhere a little bit darker to take your photos getting away from that light pollution and being able to capture photos at night without that spoiled sky and the bright unnatural light that's ideal so new moon clear night away from city light pollution those are the ideal settings for the type of astrophotography i'm going to be talking about in this video the next tip is to plan your shot and this may seem obvious but you'd be surprised at how many people just say well i'm going to get my camera and go and try and take pictures in the night sky and that lack of planning really ruins their night and sets them up for disappointment so there's a few great apps you can use on your phone i like to use a planetarium app called stellarium that helps me see what things are looking like in the night sky from my location from the time of year so you can kind of plan up your subject matter but then there's also apps that take a lot further say photo pills where you can actually really plan your shots in terms of a location if you're taking a nightscape image where a specific tree is going to be or where the milky way will be in the night sky so planning ahead of time really makes a difference and that's how you get those really special photos that people just go crazy for is when it's been well planned so plan your shot beforehand so if you're shooting the milky way you're of course going to want to know what time of year where it's going to be the core of the milky way across the night sky if it's a specific constellation or deep sky object you're going for say the orion nebula is not available in the summertime i gotta wait until winter so new moon in january february is the best time to get my orion constellation and nebula shot so just plan your sessions out and that's something i think a lot of people overlook early on and then they just take a picture of just whatever was out there and it's just kind of underwhelming okay the next one is a lot more technical so you want to find the sweet spot for your particular focal length of your camera lens and the shot you're trying to get so if you're on a stationary tripod like this yes you can use the ball head to point wherever you want which is great but of course because you're stationary and the night sky moves or the earth is moving so it looks like the night sky is moving you'll get star trailing in a long exposure image so depending on the focal length you're using if it's a say 50 millimeter lens the stars might begin to trail after 10 seconds with a crop sensor camera if you're using a shorter focal length say 24 millimeters 18 millimeters you can of course shoot longer before you see those stars start to trail so what i mean by the sweet spot is discovering where that limit is so unless you want to take star trail photos you need to find that limiting exposure value that exposure length where you can actually take your photos so for this lens the 24 millimeter lens if i'm all the way back not zoomed in it's around the 15 second mark 20 second mark and because i don't want to get those star trailed photos that's what i'm going to stick to a lot of people use the 500 rule it's a bit ancient now people seem to get angry when i talk about it but it's basically just a calculation to discover the maximum exposure length for your camera lens so as you increase that focal length that time will get shorter and shorter and in astrophotography generally you want to shoot as long as possible so being able to shoot with a wide angle lens for say 30 seconds if you have like a fisheye lens or just super wide angle say eight eight millimeters then you can probably get that 30 second exposure on a stationary tripod which is really nice so knowing that it might end up determining the types of lenses that you're looking for or your next lens purchase the bottom line is you want to have a little discovery process of where that sweet spot is now we've only talked about focal length so far but there's also your aperture too so in general because we're photographing the night sky and it's dark out you want to have a fast lens so those lenses that are f 2.8 or 1.8 or 1.4 those are great for astrophotography this one's an f4 so it's a bit slower so i'll probably be shooting right at that f4 with a lens like this as those lenses get faster and you shoot at those fast like 1.8 2.0 apertures then you might notice that your lens isn't doing such a great job at capturing sharp stars especially near the edges of the frame so what astrophotographers often do is stop down the lens to get sharper so even if you do have an f 1.4 lens you might be better off at shooting at f2 just to sharpen things up a bit and f2 is still plenty fast so because these are long exposure images taken at night the slightest camera shake can ruin your photos you'll see those stars jiggle and believe it or not it'll capture that in your image even if it's just a small shake at the beginning of the exposure so you take your picture and that can be enough by just pressing the shutter button to shake the image and ruin the photo so you want to use the delay timer on your camera on this 7d mark ii i'll just use the two second delay timer or even 10 second just to be safe and then step away from the camera with that setting applied you want to take a minimum of 10 images and i'll get into that why later but don't just take one image and expect to bring that into lightroom or photoshop and really be able to play with it you want to take multiple exposures so say the limit for this lens is 15 seconds i'll take 10 15 second exposures at f4 the iso setting you use is also important so you may be tempted to really crank up that iso to say 3200 or 6400 and again this is another discovery process based on the camera that you use so some dslrs and mirrorless cameras are noisier than others when you get into those higher isos the newer ones are getting a lot better but you'll find once you start taking these types of astrophotography images that you'll look at the data and say okay well iso 6400 is just too noisy even if i do take multiple exposures and stack them and improve that noise and post-processing it's just too noisy for my liking so i know the limit is iso 3200 and with this camera the 7d mark ii i found that the iso setting of 1600 is about as noisy as i want to deal with on a hot night you might notice it gets even noisier with that thermal noise so again there's a discovery process of the perfect iso setting for your specific camera so just as a recap for the camera settings i would use for this exact rig here if you have something similar this 24 millimeter lens i'll be taking 15 second exposures at iso 1600 from a dark sky site and then shooting at f4 and then the images on the back of the camera screen tell a story for the type of result that you're going to get you may notice that the images look bright on the back of the camera screen and that wow it's a you know really bright image and maybe too bright and it doesn't even look like it's taken at night anymore that's okay what you need to do there is look at the histogram if the data is too far to the right and actually clipped off in the end that means that you've blown out the highlights of the image whether it's the glow from the the night sky if there's a little bit of light pollution or your deep sky object or the stars themselves you're blowing out your data you don't want to do that because if you keep it within the safe zone you can actually play with it later bring up the highlights mid-tones bring down the shadows whatever you want but that histogram shows you where that data lies so that's very important so take your image with those settings during your discovery process if you find out that shooting at f2 it's blown out you can dial that back stop it down to f 3.2 lower the iso setting or even lower the exposure time ideally you want to keep that exposure time at that maximum range and then play with the iso and aperture after that iso is kind of a last resort for brightening the image you want to shoot at the lowest iso possible so for this camera iso 1600 f4 15 second exposures histogram looks great that's a good astrophoto that's the images i can play with later in post-processing so i set a minimum of 10 exposures and there's a really good reason why ideally you could take 20 or 30 exposures or even more because in astrophotography there's something called the signal to noise ratio and through integration and image stacking we can improve that ratio so the images are less noisy and we actually get more signal or light in the image that we can actually play with in post-processing so it's really cool when you start to understand it so by taking those multiple exposures you can then stack them whether you do it manually or with a third-party software to really improve your final image and that's the one you process so as for stacking early on i recommend stacking in photoshop layering the images on top of each other and you just step down that opacity range so the random noise pattern is layering on top of each other while your signal remains constant it's really cool when you get into it and i have a lot of tutorials on image stacking on this channel if you're using a third-party software like deep sky stacker that does it for you you just enter in your light frames and even before you get into calibration frames and dark frames and flats and all these other things just stacking light frames alone can really improve your final image and give you something really fun to play with in photoshop so photoshop is the weapon of choice for a lot of astrophotographers and it's kind of what people use to do their final tweaks even if they use these other software tools to calibrate and integrate their data they usually end up in photoshop just to make the final adjustments when you have your stacked image in photoshop you can gently pull up those mid tones pull down the darks and the highlights you can really manipulate the data to really showcase the object that you're trying to focus on so if that's the milky way you can get that milky way core colors the brightness coming out of there and then pulling back that dark sky probably the most powerful one though is bringing up that saturation so boosting the colors in the vibrance of your image that can make a huge difference those are all things you do in photoshop with that stacked file in the end i hope that you were able to follow along and this is all starting to make sense these are things that i learned very early on uh we're going back almost 10 years now when i was at this stage and i had my tripod and i had a ball head and camera lens and these shots can be amazing a setup like this is capable of taking absolutely incredible shots under the right conditions if you're in the city like me without using a filter or anything it's not going to be the best image because that light polluted sky kind of washes everything out but if you get to a dark sky site in the middle of summer and you're photographing the milky way you might be amazed at the images that you're getting right out of the camera in a 15 second exposure with the right settings so it's a really exciting stage of astrophotography and these are the basics that i want you to know if you're just getting started in astrophotography and this video helped you please give a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel for more content like this i'll never forget about the beginners and what it's like to be a beginner in this daunting hobby and i'm here to help you along the way until next time clear skies [Music] you

Channel: AstroBackyard

Views: 309,605

Keywords: astrophotography tips, astrophotography how to, camera settings, DSLR astrophotography, astrophotography for beginners, basics, guide, tips, tutorial, astrobackyard, photography, night photography, beginner, no telescope, no tracker, no star tracker, tripod, wide-angle, Canon, DSLR, milky way, milky way photography

Id: lIPXT4P-nWg

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020