Astrophotography tutorial. How to photograph the milky way

Hey guys, this is Nick with another video and today we're actually going to be re-recording an old video that I did. I used to have a video about astrophotography up on my YouTube channel and it's just gotten so out of date and it's one of my earliest videos and it's been bothering me so we're going to re-record it. I've learned a lot of things in the last couple years and I wanted to kind of pass some of that stuff on. So anyways, we're out here to shoot some stars and anytime you're going to be photographing some stars there's some things to keep in mind. The first of which is you're looking for a nice dark night. So tonight the moon set about a half hour ago and it was just a sliver of a moon. That's exactly what you're looking for when you're going to shoot stars. The moon is going to brighten up the sky and it's going to kill the contrast in the sky. So if you were thinking about shooting the Milky Way it's super tough with the moon up. The second thing is light pollution. We're here in eastern Washington and there's pretty much no light pollution because there's not really any cities to create it. So we're in a nice dark place. So one of the things that I see people doing often that kind of ruins their star shots is that there's nothing interesting in the foreground. You need to have that foreground element to make it a compelling picture. Just like you know you see those shots of a really nice sunset and there's nothing in the foreground it just makes for a boring picture. So same with our star shots we need to have something interesting in the foreground. So that could be a tree, that could be a old building, that could be a car, anything really. It doesn't have to be the most amazing subject in the world but just having something in the foreground will create that compelling image. Okay so let's go over here and we're going to start taking some shots and let's get to it. Okay quick rundown of the basic things you're going to need. The first and most basic thing is you're going to need a flashlight. You're out here bumping around in the dark. You're going to need it. You're probably going to be doing some light painting anyways so flashlight super handy. Second thing you need is a tripod. The sturdier the better. This is Enduro. I really like the Enduro stuff. It's a nice trade-off for quality to price. It's a good value. Okay so the first thing everybody wants to know is what kind of settings are you going to use to shoot the stars. And the thing that you start off with is your aperture. Your aperture is always going to be wide open because you need as much light as you possibly can. We're shooting in manual. That's a given. You better be shooting in manual and you're going to have your aperture wide open. This particular lens is f1.4 so that's going to allow us to open up really wide soak in a whole bunch of light and that's going to let us lower our iso a little bit. Now the second thing to keep in mind is your shutter speed. There's something called the 500 rule. Now the way it works is you take 500 and you divide it by the focal length of your lens. In this case it's 24 and that tells you how long your shutter speed can be. So obviously if you have a wide angle lens the wider the angle of the shorter the focal length the longer your shutter speed can be. So like with a 24 millimeter lens technically I could have up to a 21 second I believe it is 20 second exposure. With a 16 millimeter lens like my 16 to 35 I could have like a 31 second long exposure. So it's just a rule of thumb. It's not a hard rule because technically even at that 30 seconds you can start to see some trailing. So it's it's a taste thing but that's kind of gives you your starting place. So we know we're going to have our aperture wide open. For this exposure I'm going to go ahead and dial in 20 seconds. I'm at f1.4. Now the third variable is your iso. Your iso is going to be whatever your camera can handle. I'm shooting with a 5d mark iii and I know from experience that I've shot a lot of stars at you know iso 6400. If you're on a crop sensor 6400 looks like crap. So I recommend starting at like iso 2000 and anywhere from iso 2000 to iso 5000 that's usually a sweet spot for your for your iso. Now probably the the most important thing and the thing that I see so many people messing up is their focus. Focusing at night is super hard because your camera if you if you go to to try to make it focus it's there's nothing to focus on. So the way you're going to have to focus is a little bit different. We're going to go into live view and because of my lighting setup here it's all washed out and I've got some crazy stuff going on because of my light here. But what I'm going to do is I'm going into live view and then I'm going to hit the little magnification icon here. It's probably a little different on Nikon. I'm a Canon shooter but I'm sure Nikon I know has the the same function and I'm just going to go and find a star and zoom way in on it as far as I can and then I'm going to manually focus it to that to that star is the smallest point I can make it and then I know I know that I'm focused. So I'll be focused to infinity and I'm going to dial in iso 3200 to start off with and then I'm going to have to turn off my light to take a picture and I'll show you what that looks like now. We're going to go ahead and take the picture and now it's taking the picture. I dialed in a 20 second long exposure. Okay so this this is a manual focus lens. Your lens is probably an autofocus lens so what you need to do is you need to take it out of autofocus move it into manual focus that way it's not trying to focus every time you take a picture. So it's popping up here. I'm going to review it and you can see just how much detail we have going on here. I have a whole bunch of ambient light coming from the dome lights in my car over here so I'm going to turn those off and we'll take another picture. Okay so I got the dome lights and stuff turned off and we're going to take another picture here. So we're just going to let all of that light soak in. This particular lens I'm going to make another video about it but this is the Rokinon 24 millimeter f1.4 and I had tested a couple lenses before this including the Canon 1.4 and this one is awesome. I mean it's uh it's much cheaper it's and it doesn't have all that weird um distortions and stuff that was happening on the Canon. So we're going to review the image here and yeah you can see the Milky Way is starting to really come out. Okay so a couple more tips that come to mind. When you're out in the field and you're out here in this this really black night and you're reviewing your images your your LCD screen is backlit. So when you're looking at it it looks so bright and amazing and then you take it back to the computer and everything's just dark. Way darker than it was on the back of the camera. So one of the things you want to do is you want to go into your menu and turn your LCD brightness all the way down and then that's going to give you a much more realistic interpretation of what it actually is going to look like when you get it back onto the computer. Another thing is pay attention to your composition. It's it's really easy to just get so excited about oh man everything's looking so awesome look at that night sky and then you realize oh I clipped off the edge of my tree here. So double check your compositions and stuff. Okay so this is what my image is looking like so far. My settings on this are 20 seconds f1.4 at iso 3200 and at first it looked pretty good but now I'm thinking it's a little bit dark. So I'm going to take a couple more pictures. I'm going to turn my light off to do it and I'm going bump my iso up to about we'll we'll try for 5000 and this is going to be when I go back to the editing when I go to edit this this is going to be essentially my sky frame. I'm only going to be using the sky because I'm going to light paint the tree in my following shots. So I'm going to turn off my turn off my light take another shot and we'll see how it looks and so while it's while I'm taking this frame another thing that comes to mind is you should not do this alone because I'm hearing stuff rustling in the bushes it's creepy you should not do this alone just saying. So we're gonna let this let this come through see how much my flashlight ruined the shot. Okay so this is what our image is looking like I think it's looking pretty cool. So this is going to be our sky frame because what I like to do is I like to take it back into Photoshop and I like to have a sky a sky image where I'm just going to use the high iso image for the all the detail on the stars and then I'm going to go back and I'm going to light paint the tree at a much lower iso that way we have we're dealing with less noise and I'm going to use that for my foreground so it's time to do some light painting. Okay so what I'm going to do for my light painted frames I'm going to lower my iso down to about iso 400 and I'm going to change my shutter speed to 30 seconds. I'm going to leave the exact same composition because I need everything to line up perfectly and I'm going to change my timer over to a 10 second timer that way I can get into position and light paint from the sides and do what I need to do there. I'm going to turn my light off and and I'm going to I'll point this camera over at the tree that way you can see what I'm doing so time to do some light painting. All right so I hit hit the button and quickly a little bit about what I'm doing here. I'm going to use this giant flashlight I got and I'm going to run off to the side and I'm going to light paint just paint light onto this tree but when I do it I'm going to go way off axis I'm going to go way over to the right that way it's casting some shadows as well and it's going to be adding a lot of detail so I'm going to start a new frame and I'm going to do that now and it takes quite a bit because I'm only at iso 400 right now and when I'm doing it I'm moving around a little bit and it creates a softer light source. Okay now something I'm going to do I'm going to change the aperture stop it down to about f4 just get a little extra sharpness going on and we'll try it again because I blew out the highlights really bad in that one a lot of this is just trial and error this is a super bright flashlight so it's kind of tough to know how much it's going to take. Okay now we'll check that out I think that looks pretty good. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to do another frame and I'm going to light paint it from the other side. All right so let's take a look at our light painted images now these first couple you can see that it was actually my light here was kind of acting like a fill light and creating some lens flare and stuff so in these last couple this one and this one I turned that this my my video light off and that's what this is looking like. So I used this giant thing as opposed to this little guy and the only reason I did that is because I was going to be quite a ways away and this giant light allowed me to shoot it what was I was I stopped down to f4 and I was only at iso 200 so my foreground is going to be this nice clean noise-free image because I use this huge powerful light and it is it's really cool to be able to take all the noise out of your foreground and still have all that detail in the sky. All right so that leaves us with this this is the final image here I'm pretty happy with the results make sure you go over to nickpagephotography.com to see more tutorials go over to improvephotography.com to check out some of the podcasts I'm a part of like subscribe and we'll see you next time thanks so much bye