Shooting the "Stars"

For a city guy like me, laying on the field and counting the stars at night is a distance memory from the childhood. Therefore, during the trip at Maine, September 2009, I was so excited when I saw that many stars in the sky. I really want to photograph them.

However, photographing stars didn’t come out that easy. For people don’t have that experience, there are several things need to keep in mind.

1. Stars are very dim and photographing them needs a long-time exposure. Therefore, a tripod is a MUST HAVE equipment.

2. Stars are constantly circling in the sky (it happens slowly and most people will not noticed), and a constantly moving object will be recorded as track like path in the photograph.

3. It is very important for a photographer to decide weather he wants to shoot the stars’ moving path or the sparkle points. If the photographer is more interesting in recording the circling path, he can use up to 30 mins or longer shutter speed. If he wants the stars to be shown as a sparkle point, he should manage the exposure under 3 mins. Just keep in your mind, the number I’d suggested based on 20mm wide-angle lens. In result, different focal length may come out different result.

4. Right now, we come to the most difficult part: photographing stars with landmark. To be honest, if you see a stars’ photo with city night view, 99% of this photo is photoshopped. Compare to those city view, stars, mostly are very dim and take much longer time to be record. Therefore, you have to be very careful about choosing foreground object: the foreground object must be NO LIGHT or VERY LOW LIGHT. Otherwise, you will find out the difficulty of balancing the exposure between the foreground object and the stars.

Ok , my friends, it’s time for you guys to bring out a tripod and camera, take some pictures and tell me if I missing anything about “shoot the stars”.