(dramatic music)
- Hey everyone, my name's Gabriel Biderman
from National Parks at Night.
Give us a follow at our website, nationalparksatnight.
And tonight, we're here to talk about star trails,
but before we get started
give us a little subscribe right down below
so you can learn more with us.
So when we think about night photography
most of us think about the stars, right?
If we can get out to some sort of rural location
where we can see the Milky Way,
or even more exciting,
this week we can really take long exposures
and get these star trails
that we can't see with the human eye.
All right, so first let's talk about
the ambient light in the scene
so we can figure out our exposure.
So we're up in rural and cold coastal Maine.
The moon has just set, very little ambient light
kinda coming from any of the communities,
the towns around here, so how can I see?
When I look through my camera I can't see a thing
but I'll give you a pro tip,
and this is for DSLR users only,
but with DSLRs before you even turn it on
you look through the viewfinder
and you can actually see better than when you turn it on.
When you turn on the camera
then the meter reads in the viewfinder
and that kind of blinds us,
even though that little bit of light,
at night it blinds us.
So we can see a little bit better
when we're just settin' up
by just not turning on the camera,
looking through the optical viewfinder of the DSLR,
and that can help us kinda get in the general area
of what we want to photograph, compositionally.
All right, so we've got our camera set up on the tripod.
The first thing we're gonna do
before we even take a picture
is we're gonna make sure
that any sort of image stabilization or vibration reduction
that's either in the camera or in the lens is turned off.
When you're on a rock solid tripod there is no movement
so it actually creates movement
and your images at night will be blurry
so turn off the image stabilization,
vibration reduction, et cetera, before getting set up.
So how are we gonna measure the ambient light in this scene
if there's very little?
Well, we're gonna boost everything up,
we're gonna open it all up.
So we're gonna bring our ISOs all the way to 6400 ISO.
This lens can go to 2.8.
So when we're shooting dark sky photography like this
we'll need a lens that can shoot at least minimum up to 2.8,
f/4 lenses will not cut it.
We want a 2.8, 1.8, 1.4 lens.
That'll allow us to collect more light.
And then the third way is the shutter speed.
So right now, I just took a test shot
and it was at ISO 6400, 2.8, and 15 seconds
and I was able to collect a lot of light in this scene,
I can see a little bit of the foreground
as well as a pretty well-defined sky.
Let's take a look at the histogram.
I always kinda toggle between looking at it full view.
Now that histogram looks like a typical night histogram,
it is heavy on the left-hand side
but we don't want it crushed on the left-hand side.
So if we can see this one,
at 15 seconds it's off of the left-hand
all the way up to the crushed lefts,
it's up but it also is going
and it goes past the first quarter
and it's kind of almost making its way to the halfway point.
I might actually go up maybe from 15 seconds,
one more stop of light would be 30 seconds,
so depends how much of the foreground is important to us.
So now that we've got our exposure nailed down
now we need to make sure
that the next major thing is nailed down as well
and that is focus, okay?
Focus is really incredibly challenging
in a rural dark sky night scene
but I got three tips for you.
Tip number one, use a flashlight
and kind of choose something
at a moderate distance that's important, okay?
Maybe 15 to 30 feet away
while when you're using a wide angle lens,
something wider than a 24 millimeter lens.
If we focus on that then there's a pretty good chance
we'll have that subject matter at 15 to 30 feet in focus
as well as the stars.
Tip number two, use Live View on the back of the screen
and zoom in to the moon, a planet, or a bright star.
Now this technique really only works
when we have subject matter
that's like 40, 50 feet away and the sky.
Tip number three, and that is called hyperfocusing.
You know, this is an old landscape technique.
When we have subject matter that's really close,
let's say six feet to 10 feet away
and we wanna get the stars sharp,
we're gonna use the hyperfocus technique
where we figure out, depend upon the lens,
depend upon the camera, what distance we're gonna focus on
generally before the subject matter
that ensures that we have the subject matter
all the way through to the sky sharp.
And there's great apps we can help you figure that out,
most notably the PhotoPills app with hyperfocus.
So why do the stars trail?
Well, I'll give you a little hint, they're not moving.
Well, they are moving but the way that we're capturing them.
We are actually capturing
the earths rotation on its own axis, right?
Now the stars are gonna trail,
because its rotating on that axis
the stars are going to trail depending on
which direction we are pointing our camera, right?
If we point it to the north and we have Polaris in the shot,
now Polaris is typically the star
that doesn't trail that much, it's usually just that dot
and then everything kind of rotates around it
but because we're rotating
and Polaris is the closest to that northern axis point,
it doesn't seem like it is moving
because we are rotating along that axis point.
So this is really interesting
'cause we could be creative with how we are composing
our subject matter and now the sky.
These are too things that now we can interplay
and if we know which way the stars are trailing
we can choose the direction to see how they kind of collide
or interact with our subject matter.
All right, like I said, we had a base exposure,
now that's not gonna really create a star trail.
The stars in there look more like star points right now.
So what do I do with that exposure?
So let's think about those factors,
ISO, apertures, and shutter speeds, okay?
So first off, ISOs.
The lower the number ISO,
the cleaner the image quality will be,
the more saturated the colors will be.
So how can I extend time?
Well, first thing I'm gonna lower those ISOs.
Apertures, like I said, if I have that more wide open
I'll be able to see more stars,
and it's pretty dark here
so I'm gonna probably keep it open at 2.8 for now.
I have one quick pro tip for you.
It's a easy way to do all the math that's involved in this
and it's what we call the 6400 six stop rule.
And when we're doing a higher ISO test shot at 6400,
and this one again was 15 seconds,
if you go 6 stops down that would be 100.
So if we move the ISO 6 stops from 6400 to 100,
the seconds, whatever the seconds are,
in this case 15, will equal the same number in minutes.
So a 15 second exposure at 6400
is gonna equal 15 minutes at ISO 100.
Let's do two minutes and just let's see
what the stars look like at two minutes.
All right, guys, we've got our two shots.
So here's the two minute shot
and to be honest with you, let's take a look at those stars.
Those are nice but looking at the picture
there's not enough movement, right?
There's not enough movement,
it just kinda looks like it's a real nice foreground,
the water, but I'm not seeing enough of that movement
for me to kind of, for it to be of interest in the scene.
But we went to 15 minutes, okay,
now we are playing the sky against the foregound.
We got a little light from our little video light
but I can take care of that.
What's so fun about star trails
is we cannot see it with the naked eye.
Most cameras out there on the market right now,
the longest exposure they can do is 30 seconds, okay?
After 30 seconds we have what's called
either a T mode or a B mode.
I like to live in that B mode, the Bulb mode,
and that basically means that when you click it
it can hold it open for as long as you want.
Now usually that means if we're holding it with our finger
we're gonna have to keep our finger on the camera, okay?
T mode, if your camera has T mode,
you can click it once with your finger
and then click it again and that shuts it off.
That's nice, not every camera comes with T mode.
If we're gonna live in Bulb mode then we need,
see this wire here?
This is going to a Vello ShutterBoss Intervalometer.
We need an intervalometer and then we set,
make the settings in here,
we can set it to whatever we want.
So how do we figure out star points first?
'Cause that'll help us define
how far we can go with our star trails.
Now we use a simple rule for star point photography
and the rule is the 400 rule,
and this is for full-frame cameras, okay?
So with a full-frame camera,
and let's just say a 40 millimeter lens,
we're gonna divide the focal length of that lens,
so 40 millimeters goes into 400, 10 times.
That number 10, that is the maximum amount
of seconds we can capture
before stars will start to trail in the image.
For instance, the lens I'm using tonight
is the 14 to 24 millimeter at 14 millimeter
and so 14 goes into 400 about 26,
so I round it out to 25 seconds.
So I have a lot more time
that I can kind of lower my ISOs at
and kind of hopefully have a cleaner image with that.
Now what if we have a APS-C size sensor?
We're gonna use a shorter time.
And that number for APS-C is gonna be 250.
So we take, with our APS-C camera,
look at the lens and we divide that number into 250.
And for Micro Four Thirds,
'cause that sensor's even smaller,
the number's gonna be 200.
So take again the focal length of the lens
and divide that into 200 and that'll give you
where your starting point is for star points
and then we could push it further for the star trails.
As cold as we might be or as tired as we might be
from a long night of shooting
we are always excited to see our work, aren't we?
There's nothing more exciting
than seeing a star stack come together
so let's walk you through the process of stacking stars.
Now the star stacking process
that I'm gonna take you through
is gonna be in Lightroom and in Photoshop.
So first things first,
we've ingested all of the images into Lightroom
and unless something needs working
I like to kind of just assemble
and look at the images before working on them
until after I stack them because once we stack them
there could be more problems that could introduced
so I'd rather kind of look at it first
and then have the option to attack the issues in Photoshop
or bring 'em back into Lightroom.
All right, so we've got our final test shot,
you know, and then this image should be our first
of a series of images then that will be stacked
but again, we can always double confirm in Lightroom,
can look at the metadata,
and we can see the actual time it was taken,
and if I'm doing four minutes
I can see this one is the first image right here.
So I'm going to mark the first image in the series
with a color, so I'm gonna do that,
and then go all the way to the end of the series
which is right here, okay?
And I mark them with the number six
which again marks them with a red flag, okay?
And then once they are all selected
I'm gonna go up to Photo,
Edit In, and then all the way down to the bottom,
Open as Layers in Photoshop.
Okay, so here we are.
We've got the 18, now, layers of images
and you can see they're all brought in
as layers in Photoshop
which is all over here, right?
And it doesn't look like much has happened here
because these layers are not being blended the right way.
So what we're gonna do is
we're gonna make sure the top one is selected
and go all the way to the bottom
and hit Shift + click, okay?
And then we're gonna go over here to the Blending Mode
and when we change from Normal to Lighten, right there,
boom, isn't that magical?
Isn't that just fantastic?
We try to previsualize this in the field as best we could
but it really just makes it all worthwhile
when we get something like that.
So what does Lighten mode do, okay?
Lighten mode allows all of the bright points
in all the images to come forward.
Let's just zoom in one last
and just check in one more thing.
Let's go to 100%.
I always like to look at the stars at 100%
because that's how they will print,
and one of the issues that can happen with star stacking
is that we could, we have the possibility
of seeing the breaks in the stars, because again,
they're shorter stars that are being stacked together.
But I am looking here at those brightest stars
and they look quite clean to me.
All right, so final thing, we're happy with the product,
and we are going to save it.
So we have the choice to save it
with all the layers intact as they are
but we really didn't do any work on these layers
so I'm gonna flatten the image,
gonna take the layers and flatten it,
which takes any of the work that I've done
and now collects those 18 images
and puts it into one single, slightly smaller image.
And now I can just go up to again and then File, Save.
And we can see that's recording down here
and that was pretty quick
and then that just drops it right back into Lightroom.
And we can see the file right there, okay?
And here's our final image right there.
And then I'll go ahead
and work on it in Lightroom from there.
I'm a little bit more proficient in Lightroom.
And my final product, converting it to black and white,
giving it a little bit of extra clarity, a touch of dehaze,
and some other things right there, is that, okay?
So pretty exciting, star trails are super fun.
Again, I love it because we're kind of seeing
with the mind's eye, all right?
We go there, we compose, we look at the stars,
we try to figure out which way they're gonna go,
and then we settle into it
and then a lot of times we're gonna come back
and in postprocessing the magic's gonna up,
it'll pop, and it'll all come together.
That about wraps it up
for our How to Make Star Trails video.
If you wanna learn more night photography
check out our other videos on night photography,
and if you wanna learn more hands-on
then come take a workshop with National Parks at Night
and really seize the night.
(gentle music)