Night Sky Photography

I was asked to write about how I took pictures at night.First off, it is incredibly easy to achieve beautiful results. You don’t need a top of the line DSLR or expensive glass. All you need is a camera that you can adjust the exposure manually and a tripod. 

Obviously, you need a clear night, but a few clouds is actually a good thing. A wide angle lens is usually best, a kit lens set at 18mm will work just fine. Mount your camera on a tripod, put it in manual mode, and try these settings. Turn your iso up to 3200 (it might only go to 1600), open your aperture to F/3.5, and set your shutter all the way at 30 seconds. Put your camera in manual focus and turn it all the way to infinity. If the image is too bright, turn your iso down, if it is too dark, turn it up. Find a place in the sky where the stars are easily visible but there is also some sort of subject; cars, cityscapes, lonely trees, airplanes, and anything else interesting make great subjects. Look for other light sources or moving objects that might be interesting as well. Anything that is moving will be blurry or even not existent in the final image since your shutter is open so long. Just to the right of the image I shot was a warehouse with bright lights, which is why the bottom right of my image is so bright. I shoot everything in RAW which allows me much more flexibility in post processing. For my image, I adjusted it in camera RAW and then opened it in Photoshop and turned the contrast up and did an exposure adjustment layer. 

Go out and try it. Let me know if you have any questions :)

Focal point

Every image should have a clearly defined focal point.
When you look at a picture, you quickly (and without thinking about it) scan the image and your eyes rest on a point. In portraits, this is usually the eyes.
The focal point of a landscape is usually the brightest spot of the image (the sun for example.)

While I was framing this shot, there was a clear focal point, the cars head lights OR the lightning.
(I was yet to capture them both at the same time)
So the images were good. It had a clear focal point and it was interesting.

I took hundreds of exposures before I caught the lightning and cars passing simultaneously.
I was ecstatic, I even changed our Facebook status!
I ran inside and pulled up my images in bridge to check them out.
As soon as I saw the image, i realized that the lightning actually HURT the image!!


Close your eyes, then look at the picture. You will notice your eyes bouncing from the lightning, to the the car lights. There is no good focal point, your eyes don't know where to rest.

I quickly "photoshopped" the lightning out so you could see the difference.
With no lightning, your eyes immediately find the focal point.

Moral of the story, make sure your images have a clear focal point. Your eyes should quickly rest on a single spot. Lines (such as moving headlights) help draw your eyes to the focal point.

So what do you think. Lightning or no lightning??

Shoot simple and stunning silhouettes

A silhouette is the image of a person or object consisting of the outline and featureless interior, usually being black.

Have you ever tried to take a silhouette picture of a palm tree or a friend jumping against a beautiful sunset and all you get is a blown out white sky?? When I think of a silhouette, I usually think of a beautiful sunset landscape with a tree or two.

Snapping a stunning sunset takes some knowledge of photography and your manual exposure settings. The first thing we must understand is that your goal is to properly expose the sky and to capture its vivid colors. When your camera is on anything but manual exposure mode, your camera usually tries to properly expose the person or the tree, so it allows the shutter to be open longer or the aperture to be bigger, which causes the sky to be blown out and white. What I do first is make sure that my ISO is set around 200 and I usually close my aperture up to increase my depth of field. Start with an aperture of F/5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/200s and see what you get. Too light? Stop down your aperture to F/8 or speed up your shutter to 1/400s. If your subject is moving, speed up your shutter, if you want your subject and the background to be in focus, close up your aperture. If your subject is not completely black, that it is fine, it is very easy to correct with any basic photo editor.

Try getting down low and get the grass in the bottom of the frame your subject off center. With landscapes, you want to have multiple “layers.” A foreground, such as grass, a middleground such as a person or tree, and a background like your sky.

The great things about silhouettes is that you can get gorgeous pictures almost anywhere. Try getting a cityscape or a barn; some power lines or just a tree. Almost everything looks cool when it’s a silhouette. Here are a few examples we took in our own backyard.

I want to see some of your silhouette pictures. Post them here!