a tripod your camera and your kit lens even though I'm using the a 6500 in this
tutorial you should be able to follow along with any of the a 6000 series
cameras and also you'll probably be able to follow along with any crop censored
camera as well the menu placements might be different but the principle is the
same I have the kit lens I also have a lower 12 millimeter 2.8 and the sony 10
to 18 millimeter f/4 with the kit lens at 16 millimeters at its widest this is
the equivalent to around about 24 millimeters on a full-frame camera the
first thing you need to do is find a dark sky location I do this by using the
website WWWE pollution map info basically the darker the color on the
map the better the skies will be so you need to be away from any big cities or
big sources of light I actually had to travel for three hours to get to the
location to shoot this tutorial and that's what you might have to do you
might have to find a dark location or you might have to travel quite a way to
get to a good location now there is a scale called the boat'll classification
and basically what this is is a scale of light pollution and how good or how bad
it is 9 is the worst one is the best if you look on light pollution map info and
click on a location it'll give you this bottle rating anything with a bottle
rating of 5 or lower is really good you can shoot the stars with higher ratings
but there'll be less stars in the sky because the light pollution will bleach
out these stars and if you can find a location with a bottle classification of
2 or lower that's fantastic and you'll get some really brilliant night skies as
there's very little light about the camera needs to be really good at
low-light capture and the a6000 series of cameras are really good at the
if you pair this with a really good fast lens with basically a really wide
aperture you can get some really great images if you do try this out and really
enjoy it it's worth getting a manual focus lens
the twelve millimeter samyang f/2 is a great manual focus lens for this job I
could only borrow the twelve millimeter Laur which is the more expensive one but
they are very close in image quality and the samyang is a lot lighter and a lot
smaller and it actually has a wider aperture of F 2 which lets in even more
light the great thing with manual focus lenses are that once you know where the
infinity point is sometimes it's not quite on that infinity point that it's
marked too on the lens but once you know where this infinity point is you can set
it to that same point every single time so these are the steps put the camera on
a tripod make sure the back display is on turn
the mode dial to manual turn on the self timer I normally have it on two seconds
if your camera has it turn off the steady shot turn off long exposure noise
reduction change the file type to raw if you're using a zoom zoom out as wide as
possible change your white balance to incandescent switch to manual focus if
you have a marker on your lens set your focus to infinity if you don't this is
the tricky part set your ISO to about ten thousand the aperture as wide as
possible this basically means your F number as low as possible and your
shutter speed to around about six seconds find a bright star that you can
see on your display you might have to turn the brightness of your screen up a
little and then use the magnified tool making sure the bright star is in the
magnify area now turn your focus ring until you can see the star clearly and
in focus this comes down to trial and error and sometimes you might have to go
backwards and forwards until you get that focus point that you want keep the
focus in manual and try not to touch the focus
you should check your photos every now and then to make sure they are still in
focus if you've had to focus this way come out of the magnify mode then take a
shot depending on the moonlight and any ambient light from any cities nearby
your shot might be overexposed if so increase your shutter speed this
first step with having a really high ISO and relatively fast shutter speed is
merely to quickly find a pleasing composition once you've got a good
composition start bringing your ISO down and lengthening your shutter speed just
don't make the shutter speed too long otherwise the Stars will start to streak
due to the rotation of the earth now when it comes to getting pinpoint stars
there's a rule with full-frame cameras called the 500 rule this is known as the
300 rule for crop censored cameras basically what you do is take the number
300 and divide it by your focal length so with a 12 millimeter that I have you
can have a maximum exposure of 25 seconds with the kit lens at 16
millimetres which is his widest focal length you can have a maximum shutter
speed of 18 point 7 5 seconds and with a 24 millimeter you can keep the shutter
open for around about 12 and a half seconds to be honest with the really
fast lens in these modern cameras you can be a little bit more conservative
with your shutter speeds but this is where it comes down to experimentation
you want to go out and take a few different shots at different exposure
lengths and different apertures and different ISO settings you'll have lots
of time to experiment and if you're in a dark quiet location you can basically
camp and chill out and take loads of photos all the way through the night you
will be a little bit tired the next morning so just be prepared for that
then it's just a case of coming up with interesting compositions and following
the patterns of the moon and the stars to see what might give you an
interesting sky I'm into wide field Astro photography and that's where these
wide-angle lenses really come in handy if you do some research into Astro
photography you'll find that people really get into this and then they'll
start getting things like trackers telescopes and get into deep space Astro
photography and there are some amazing photos of nebulas gas clouds and things
like that as I said I'm only into widefield astrophotography so all I need
is a tripod a camera and a wide-angle lens if we look at these photos compared
with the full-frame camera I normally shoot with it's really surprising how
well the a 6500 held up to the a7 3 if you zoom in to a hundred percent even
though the noise pattern is worse in the a 6500 if you added some noise reduction
to it it would clean the image up nicely the other option would be to take a
sequence of shots and then use starry landscape stacker or sequitur and stack
these images together to reduce the noise if you want to see my video on
stacking astro images click on the I in the corner or the link in the