5. The Technical Side

To shoot in the dark requires a few necessary pieces of equipment, and a bit of technical expertise.

Equipment

• Tripod. Regardless what type of camera you’re shooting with, a solid tripod is very important. Get something that can handle the weight of your particular camera. There’s always a give and take between light-weight travel tripods and heavy-duty more solid tripods. If you get serious, you’ll end up with both. Shooting the night sky is always served well by the heavier duty tripods. Weight adds to stability, this is important as these types of shots often involve 15-30 second exposures.

• Ball Head and/or Gear Head. This is the interface between the tripod and your camera. It’s what allows you to point your camera in different directions and lock it solidly in place. A ball head is just that, your camera attaches to a metal ball within a framework that holds it in place once you’ve moved it to the spot you want to point your camera at. A good ball head can cost as much (sometimes more) than your tripod. An inexpensive ball head will let your camera sag down when you tighten it so it isn’t pointed exactly where you wanted it to be — a very frustrating thing when you thought you had your camera all framed up, only to have it sag down due to its own weight. A good ball head won’t do that.

  • A Gear Head does the same thing, but with three geared axes and you can do fine adjustments with no sag. I use a combination of both—a good ball head attached to the top of my gear head. You don’t need both, I just like the combination.

  • A Clock Drive is a more advanced piece of gear. This is a tracking device that mounts on top of your tripod, and when properly aligned with the polar axis of Earth, will track your camera to counter Earth’s rotation allowing longer exposures without star trails. It does away with the 500 rule, but it must be exactly aligned with Earth’s polar axis.

• Remote Shutter Control. When you’re shooting long exposures, even a simple light touch upon the camera will create a shake which will create wiggly stars, so you need to be able to trigger the shutter without touching your camera. You can use the delay feature on the camera where you press the camera’s shutter button and the camera waits a predetermined number of seconds before the shutter opens, allowing time for the vibrations created by pressing the shutter button to subside. Many photographers, myself included, prefer a remote control so you don’t have to touch the camera at all.

  • An intervalometer is a fancy remote control that allows you to take multiple exposures with a short gap between each exposure. This can be used for creating time-lapses or for stacking multiple exposures. Stacking can bring out extra detail and effectively created a longer exposure from a series of shorter exposures. It is probably the best way to create star trail shots. For example, to create a decent star trail shot showing the movement of stars about Polaris, the North Star, you might set your intervalometer to take 20 second exposures, 1 second apart, continuously for an hour or more, that would result in over 100 exposures, then all those exposures would be combined to make one photograph. Another feature of an intervalometer is that you can set exposure lengths greater than 30 seconds. High end cameras often have intervalometers built in.

• Spare Batteries Have several, and if the wether is cold, keep them warm next to your body.

• Red Flashlight. A flashlight is a useful tool in the dark so that you don’t leave anything behind in the end, but sometimes you may need to search for things in your camera bag or look at a star chart while you’re working around your camera. The red light will have the least amount of negative effect upon your eye’s dark adaptation, but don’t use even the red light during your exposure unless you want something lit up red!

• White Light Flashlight or LED Lights. These lights are used to light up your foreground during an exposure. This brings out the foreground, otherwise you’ll end up with black silhouettes which can be nice too. It’s nice to experiment with both, no lights and lights. How much light it takes to illuminate the foreground takes experimentation, things closer need less light, more distant foreground objects may need more light to show up the way you want. Experiment and see what you get, that’s part of the fun!

• Warm clothes, Shoes, Gloves. In the winter it’s obviously cold, but doing photography is a colder activity than cross country skiing or snowshoeing because it’s not aerobic, it’s a lot of standing around. You’ll want more warm layers than you would if you were doing something more active. Warm pack boots or mukluks are good in winter. I like gloves where I can uncover just my fingers to work the camera. Hand and toe warmers are highly recommended for winter shooting.

• Bug Repellant. In warm weather you might want bug repellant. DEET works best, but be careful not to get DEET on your camera gear or lenses, it can deteriorate lens coatings and can dissolve some plastics.

• Photo Processing Software. This is used when you get home to process your photos. Preferred software would be Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, or Photoshop Elements.

Technique

Okay, now you’ve got the gear, you’re out in some beautiful location in the middle of the night, the stars are brilliant overhead, the camera’s mounted on a fancy ball-head atop a rock solid tripod. What do you do now?

• Set your camera to M. That’s the manual setting.

• Turn on Mirror Lock Up if you’re using a DSLR camera. Now when the shutter button is pressed, the mirror will goes up, then a second or two elapses before the shutter opens. This allows the vibration of the mirror motion to subside.

• Set your camera’s file format to RAW.

• Set your aperture to wide open, for my 14mm lens that’s f/2.8 for example.

• Set your shutter speed to a long exposure, say 20 or 30 seconds.

• Set your ISO to something high, anywhere from 1000 to 3200 to perhaps even 4000. Experiment. Remember, the higher the number the more sensitive the sensor is to light, but the higher the noise (grain).

• Turn off lens stabilization. Stabilization works great for handheld photography, but on a tripod there’s no motion and the stabilization will look for motion and in the process of looking for motion it creates it.

• Turn off auto-focus. You’ll need to manually focus, we’ll talk about that soon. There’s not enough light for auto-focus to work.

• Set your shutter to the Remote Control setting. Turn on your remote or intervalometer. Attach the intervalometer interface if your remote and camera require one.

• Take off the UV filter on your lens. UV filters are great for protecting your lens and they don’t cause a problem in bright light, but in dim light they can cause faint reflections that will show up in the photos as slightly offset ghost images.

• Remove or tie off your shoulder strap so that it doesn’t blow in the wind, wiggling your camera and ruining your exposure.

• Focus. You probably won’t see much through your DSLR viewfinder except the brightest stars. Point your camera at the brightest star you can see. Turn on Live View, center the bright star in the camera’s LCD screen, then increase the magnification as much as possible keeping the star within the live view. Now manually focus the star by making its image is as small as possible. Note the spot on the lens focus ring, that will be your focus for that night. Since most lenses can focus past infinity, you shouldn’t trust the infinity mark as the proper focus, it might be the correct focus, it might not. Also, the spot where the focus is correct on one night might not be the spot on another evening with different temperatures. Do this focusing procedure each night to get the proper focus.

• Point the camera at your target, level it as best you can. Tighten it down with your ball head. Let your companions know you’re about to expose so they don’t turn on unwanted lights. Check to make sure there are no airplanes or satellites traversing your field of view.

• Take your first exposure. When it’s done, look at it on the camera’s LCD screen and make adjustments to the exposure settings (exposure time, ISO, aperture) to get closer to what you want in your next exposure. If you’re light painting the foreground with a flashlight, determine whether you had too much or too little light. Adjust accordingly. If the horizon is not level, adjust it. Then shoot again.

• Remember, to watch your footing in the dark, especially if the ground is uneven or you’re near a cliff. You also don’t want to fall or accidentally kick your tripod. Watch for critters too. We spent an evening at Cape Gaspé in Quebéc shooting the Milky Way with two large porcupines wandering around on the ground near us the whole time we were there.

• Repeat. Breathe. Have fun.

• Process your photos at home with Lightroom or Photoshop. Always start with making a duplicate of the original so in case you ruin it, you haven’t ruined the original. Never work on the original. Adjust you color balance. Experiment with brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance, and saturation. If you know how to use masks, they will allow you to work specific parts of the image without affecting other parts. Play with your image, don’t be afraid to experiment, you’re working with a duplicate so it’s okay to make mistakes. Remember, there’s always the Command-Z undo button.