Equipment Needed for Nightscape Photography and Light Painting
For basic nightscapes, the equipment required is not extensive, and the chances are you already have it:
- Digital camera (DSLR, mirror-less, compact camera with manual modes, smartphone with manual mode)
- Wide angle lenses, ideally ranging from 14mm to 50mm (for full frame, or their equivalent for cropped sensor cameras).
- Sturdy tripod and tripod head (the tripod head can be a ball head, or a geared head)
- A reasonably powerful torch / flashlight, ideally with a zoom / beam facility
- Remote shutter release with built-in intervalometer (even if your camera has an intervalometer)
- Lens warmer (powered by USB powerbank)
- Warm clothing....even in the summer!
- Sturdy footwear / boots with thick socks (walking boots or rubber boots are recommended)
- Headtorch with red light facility (very useful for adjusting camera settings whilst preserving night vision)
- Stellarium installed on your Mac/PC, and the Stellarium app installed on your smartphone
- Photopills app installed on your smartphone
- Starstax software (free for both Mac and PC) for image stacking star trail images
- Sequator (Windows - free) and Starry Landscape Stacker (Mac - about £39) for stacked images of the nightsky
- LED panel light for low level lighting (not essential, but very useful)
Those items highlighted in red are not essential, but they will come in very handy if you start to take any form of night photography seriously.
I recently went out to shoot a church at night and my son came along with me to keep me company. As I was setting up my tripod, he was asking me how he could take similar shots with his smartphone. I have to admit that I said he probably couldn't, and more than likely I struggled to suppress a self-superior scoff at the very notion! However, I relayed to him what I was doing to my camera, and he mirrored these settings in "pro" mode on his smartphone. By the time I had taken my lens cap off, he had captured an excellent shot of the Orion constellation above the nearby mountains!!! So this goes to show, it is not about the camera, but about whether or not you know how to use it in manual mode.
The first thing to mention at the outset is that none, not one, of the auto modes on your camera is going to help you with nightscape photography. It should go without saying that you will be shooting in RAW as you will need the maximum amount of data available to you to capture detail in the sky and for the purposes of post production (editing) afterwards. Some smartphones support RAW image capture, and this option should certainly be selected if you are shooting nightscapes with your phone.
You need to be familiar with manual mode, setting the exposure manually (aperture, shutter speed and ISO), you need to focus manually, as the camera will not be able to autofocus easily in the dark (unless you have the moon, Sirius, Venus or some other very bright object in the sky that the autofocus will lock onto). You will need to make sure that once focused (even if you've managed to autofocus), the autofocus is switched off. This is essential if you have the shutter release button configured to focus with a half press of the button. You will need to set the White Balance manually as well, to a specific K value of your personal choice (more on this shortly).
If you have a vibration reduction enabled lens, make sure this is switched off, as the camera is going to be locked onto a tripod.
If, like me, you are a "Back Button Focus" type, the focusing issue is already taken care of. You will be used to activating autofocus with the back button (which you won't be using for night photography), leaving the shutter release button doing just that.
I am always being asked "what settings, camera and lens did you use?", and this is, of course, irrelevant, as lens choice will depend upon the image I am creating and any settings will be determined by the ambient light conditions as well as the brightness of the subject itself. The camera is also irrelevant as it is the lens that plays the key role in the success of the image. The sensor will have an impact on noise, but even here, a lot depends on how you set up the camera in the first place. It is true that newer cameras will probably handle noise better than old ones. That said there are a number of excellent noise management apps available that do an excellent job of handling noise in your images. Adobe Photoshop's latest "Ai Denoise" is a game changer for high ISO night photographers.
For starters, here are the the settings / modes I would dial into the camera before I take the first shot. These settings will then change as a result of an examination of that first shot, so please use these settings below as an indicative first step:
- Manual Mode
- Dim your monitor brightness to its lowest setting. It's amazing just how bright this is in the dark!!
- Make sure the auto-playback of images taken is turned off (this eats battery life)
- Autofocus switched off (not necessary if you are BBF)
- ISO 1600 (this will almost certainly increase, depending on conditions and subject brightness)
- Auto ISO switched off (if you are a user of this facility)
- Aperture: f2.8 or wider if you have a faster lens, but in any case, the widest aperture you have...as a starter!
- White Balance: I set this to a manual Kelvin value of 3850 (I like my night skies to be deep blue)
- Shutter Speed: now this is dependent upon the focal length of the lens you are using..............
......If you are using a full-frame camera, then I would recommend using the "300 Rule" if you want to avoid the stars being recorded as tiny streaks or trails. If you want the stars to appear as points of light (as they appear to your eye), then the 300 Rule should be applied. This is simply a case of dividing 300 by your chosen focal length. So, if you are using a 20mm prime lens, or the 20mm position on your zoom lens, the sum will simply be 300 / 20 = 15 seconds. If you are using a crop sensor camera with the same lens as above, you have to account for the crop factor (as your 20mm is actually functioning as a 30mm focal length, due to the cropped sensor), and the sum would be 300 / (20 x 1.5) = 10 seconds. [This assumes a crop factor of 1.5, which is the case for Nikon crop sensors, but I believe Canon is 1.6.....check your camera's specifications before calculating].
This tells you straight away that, if you are starting out at 1600 ISO, and the required shutter speed for your focal length is 15 seconds, then the cropped sensor user will have to increase the ISO of the camera to compensate for the comparatively shorter exposure. This is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, a full frame sensor is best for night photography, as you are generally wanting to capture the maximum amount of data with the minimum amount of noise.
You are now ready to go out into the night and capture some wonderful nightscape images.