How to Start Astrophotography // Part Two

This is the second part of my two part series on how to start astrophotography. In this post I will be covering compositions (what is in your photo), how to take more advanced photos and editing techniques I use. In my first post I covered what I knew about the equipment and settings within the camera, and you can find that here!

DIFFERENT COMPOSITIONS

Compositions talk about whether the photo is a regular shot, a star trail or something entirely different. For example:

In my last post, I talked about how to take regular star photos using a tripod and DSLR camera with Manual Mode.

How to Create Star Trail Photos

Star trail photos are little different, and can be intimidating. There are two ways to create these shots – either you deliberately use the earth’s rotation in your photo, or stack exposures in special software.

How to Take Star Trail Photos the Traditional Way

If you are planning to take a long exposure photo to capture the trails in one shot, you will need to switch from Manual mode to what is called Bulb on a Canon camera. This enables you to hold and release the shutter at your own speed (instead of being limited to 30 seconds.) It pays to have a shutter release cable or remote, so that you don’t have to use an app (and rely on your phone battery and automatic screen off setting), *cough* not speaking from experience at all *cough.*

Once your camera is shutting and releasing remotely, set a time for how long you want your exposure to be. I tend to go for between 45 minutes to an hour and a half. So be prepared to be patient.

Your ISO should typically be low, as the shutter is going to be open for a while. This will in turn create a bright image. The time will all depend on how long you intend to take the photo for.

I generally leave the aperture low.

The app I recommend in my first post, ‘Photo Pills‘ enables you to find where the Zenith and Nadir are (the axis on which Earth rotates). In the top right of the trail shot above, I have the center of rotation in my photo. Planning a photo around this will determine how long your star trails are. As shown above, the further away from the center of rotation you are, the long your streaks will be.

How to Make Star Trail Photos the less traditional way

Alternatively, most intermediate-advanced cameras come with a setting called an intervalometer. These can be bought separately, but ultimately they work as a special timer for your camera. This setting tells your camera to continuously take photos, with an interval of a desired time. For example, I can ask my camera to take a 25 second photo every 10 seconds. I can then set this going for an hour or so, and end up with 200 or so star photos.

From here, these photos can be put into software such as Photoshop or StarStax to achieve the easier way of creating star trails. This way is a lot more foolproof, as you can nail your settings right away and will ensure you are picking up the most stars.

How to Edit Regular Star Photos

My main tip for editing star photos -and to be honest, this applies to most photography- don’t over edit. Warped colours and wacky exposure will always looks a little funky unless you have a very particular style. Aim to get the colours looking vibrant enough without looking fake.

I use Adobe Lightroom and occasionally Photoshop to edit my photos. I can’t really say there’s a particularly fast way to edit star photos because every shoot is different.

what sliders should I use?

When I’m editing a normal star photo the first setting I go to is the light. Raising the exposure slightly will help to bring out more detail in your shots that sometimes you have underexposed accidentally. Similarly, I put the contrast up to balance the photo out a little. However, overdoing this will make some of the stars disappear with colours that ‘contrast’ a bit too much. Some variety of light is good in the photo, it looks more natural.

Because of where I live and the light pollution, I tend to put my ‘highlights’ slider lower to balance out the harsh light. I instead use the ‘whites’ slider to bring out the stars from the photo. You can also use the ‘blacks’ slider to add a more contrast, but if over-used you will lose precious colours of the galaxy. The shadows slider can be handy in places to add more light to the photo, but like everything else, is to be used in moderation.

Whatever you do, unless you really have to balance out some wacky colour tones, do NOT touch the temperature slider. It can be tempting to get a golden hue or cool feel, but it risks making the photo instantly artificial. Tint can be used slightly to adjust some tones within the galaxy, but use this sparingly. Vibrance and saturation can help to bring out colours within your photo, but as always, don’t overdo it.

In terms of colour mixers, these depend on the photos themselves. I tend to up the saturation in colours like purple, pink and orange just to help give the photos a little more depth in colour.

I generally including texture, de-haze, clarity vignette and grain, however clarity used in small amounts can be good to bring out details. Split toning with shadows and highlights is great when you know how to use it well.

A setting I definitely recommend is the colour noise reduction, not noise reduction. This gets rid of pixelated colourful parts of your photo by having a high ISO and an edited exposure.

CREATING A COMPOSITE IMAGE

Composite basically means stapling two images together as one.

For example:

This is honestly super easy to do once you have your head around how to create it, although sadly is impossible to pull off in real life. Once in Photoshop, open your star image, which is the base photo. Pull a silhouette image on top of this. Set the silhouette image layer to Darken, which eliminates most of the highlights. There may be a bit of unwanted detail, which can all be erased manually by hand.

To touch up the final photo you can copy and paste either parts of the photo to make it look natural. For the above photo I wanted to show more of the galaxy, so I had to size down the motorbike and extend the ground using the Marquee tool. After that I filled in any gaps using the brush tool and that’s all! Easy as!

finishing up part two…

I plan on writing some more detailed posts on how to do more Photoshop based creatives, such as the star stacking, but for now this concludes my knowledge of taking star photos.

If you want to learn a bit more about photography basics, start here.

Happy snaps!

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