Night sky photography or what long exposure can do

Night sky photography has always been something facinating for me. It’s amazing how much long exposure can do. You can see the stars with your own eye, but can’t see some details as you would when you have a long exposure. What is long exposure? It’s when your shutter is open for a long time. For night sky photography 15-30 seconds should work. The trick to it is to be somewhere far away from the city and light. For the pictures below, I couldn’t capture the milky way because the moon was out and it was super bright. Lesson that I learned is you need to figure out when the moon is not up and go shoot the milky way. Here’s a good tutorial for it: http://intothenightphoto.blogspot.com/2013/05/nightscape-photo-recipe.html

Another cool thing you can do with long exposure is the half orb things like you can see at the bottom. It was done using the bike wheel and lights attached to it. When I opened the shutter for 30 seconds, a friend of mine started spinning it giving a cool effect. You can do things like these with almost any light. Go try these cool things out on your own. Night sky photography and long exposure in general has become something that I like a lot.

Setup:

Tripod:  Always use a tripod
Manual Mode:  Baseline Settings: ISO 200; f/11;  30″
Focus:  With the lights on, use autofocus to lock focus, then turn lens focus to M.
Level:  Check to see if camera is level.Timer:Turn on your timer to 5 or 10 seconds and get in place.