Nightscape photography - What am I doing wrong?

[limvo05]

Hello Experts,

My first night in Zion National Park was a disaster. I tried to take photos of the night sky but to no success. Despited the fact that I thought I did everything right to get a decent photo of the stars, the photo came out BLACK!

Below are the settings:

1. Manual settings.

2. Focal length was 24mm

3. Applied the 500 rule, i.e. 500/24 = roughly my shutter speed (21 seconds).

4. ISO 2000

5. Aperture 2.8

6. Manual focused on the distant star.

7. Steady tripod.

There was no wind, or cloud of any kind. Granted there was no milkway to been seen, that said, I was expecting to have at least captured all the stars when looking with my naked eyes.

Please let me know what I am doing wrong? I am heading over to Bryce Canyon tomorrow morningm hopefully, I'll figured out what I am doing wrong by then.

Thank you,

LV

[TCampbell]

You live-view focus method is pretty popular... I manually dial the lens to “infinity” and point the camera at any bright star.  That wont be accurate focus, but it’ll be close enough that you should see something when you go to live-view.  Then I crank the ISO to max (Canon has “exposure simulation” in live-view so if you crank the ISO to max and crank the shutter to 30 secs it’ll give you a brighter (more amplified) view of the sky and that helps with the focus.  Go to the 10x (max magnification) in live view and *carefully* adjust until I can get the star to the smallest pin-point possible (don’t use a planet to focus ... they don’t actually become pinpoint like stars so it’s harder to tell when you’ve nailed focus.)

”Lonely Speck” makes a focusing mask called the “SharpStar”.  It attaches just like a slide-in filter (such as. Lee Filter, or Formatt Hitech, or Coken, etc.) but it’s got groves cut into it to make the stars throw diffraction spikes (you’ll see three distinct spikes lines).  When all three converge at the same center point, you’ve nailed focus (it’s very accurate for stars.)

One you’ve nailed focus

1.  Don’t forget to set the lens to manual focus mode

2.  Return the ISO to something sane.

3.  Return the shutter speed to something sane (if using an intervalometer then switch to Bulb mode.)

Is there any possibility you left the AF/MF switch on the lens in AF mode ... and the camera attempted to re-focus after you manually focused? 

I have taken “black” astrophotos before ... only to realize I lost focus.  Since stars are pretty dim, instead of getting bright bokeh balls... they just wash out and you can end up seeing nothing.

Otherwise I’d re-check the exposure data to make sure the settings actually were what you intended.

Also... be aware of the “long exposure noise reduction” option in your camera.  That option (if enabled) causes the camera to take a dark frame and it uses the noise build-up from the dark frame to subtract from the light frame.  Photographers who are caught off-guard sometime think their camera locked up or is failing to write to the card.  E.g. if you took a 20 second exposure, it would do 20 secs with the shutter open, then 20 seconds with the shutter closed, subtract the “dark” frame from the “light” frame and then write the file (so it takes 40 seconds to get a 20s exposure).

[RobertTheFat]

---

@limvo05 wrote:

Hello Experts,

My first night in Zion National Park was a disaster. I tried to take photos of the night sky but to no success. Despited the fact that I thought I did everything right to get a decent photo of the stars, the photo came out BLACK!

Below are the settings:

1. Manual settings.

2. Focal length was 24mm

3. Applied the 500 rule, i.e. 500/24 = roughly my shutter speed (21 seconds).

4. ISO 2000

5. Aperture 2.8

6. Manual focused on the distant star.

7. Steady tripod.

There was no wind, or cloud of any kind. Granted there was no milkway to been seen, that said, I was expecting to have at least captured all the stars when looking with my naked eyes.

Please let me know what I am doing wrong? I am heading over to Bryce Canyon tomorrow morningm hopefully, I'll figured out what I am doing wrong by then.

Thank you,

LV

---

Never trust your lying eyes in such a situation. Not only is the dynamic range of the human eye much greater than that of any camera, the eye's sensor has extra pixels that kick in specifically for night vision. This forum has one or two members who are experts in astrophotography. See if they offer advice, and take it if they do. EDIT: Tim Campbell is one of them. I see that he responded while I was typing.

Unless they've completely remodeled Bryce Canyon since the last time i was there (1970?), it's not a particularly suitable venue for nighttime photography.