![]() You can even lock your focus ring in place by taping the focal ring down to the correct spot. Simply go through the same process with an item that’s far off in the distance that can mimic a star. You can even plan ahead with your proper focus to infinity point and set it during the day before you get into the field in the dark. If it is slightly off, I recommend marking the correct infinity point with a silver permanent marker. It may be on the correct infinity line, or it may be slightly off. When you find the point, let go and look at your focus to infinity point on your lens. Once you have found a star, adjust your focal ring around the infinity mark until it’s in perfect focus. You want it to be a bright star so that it will show up well in your viewing screen. To be sure you have the infinity point correct on your lens, use your live view mode to zoom in on one of the brightest stars in the sky. Even if you have focus peaking on your camera, it’s going to be difficult to get a good reading due to the lack of available light. ![]() Since you are typically shooting night photography with an aperture as wide as possible, getting your infinity focus is very important or else either the foreground or the sky will be out of focus. However, not all lenses have the infinity value that is exactly on the infinity mark of the lens. The most common thought with lenses and focusing is that if you just set your lens to focus to infinity then everything into infinity will be in focus. The second biggest mistake that I used to make with night photography was having some items in the frame out of focus. So, if you’re getting too much color variation from ambient light glow, simply adjust the Kelvin temperature of your white balance up or down to get the most accurate color of the sky and the foreground. I remember one early morning shooting the Milky Way in Death Valley National Park I could still see the ambient light glow from Las Vegas even though I was roughly one hundred miles from the city. The further away you are from ambient light, the darker the sky will be and the more natural the color will be. Ambient light is defined as the light reflection or light pollution from surrounding areas that are usually areas of higher populations. ![]() The one thing that’s going to give you the most problem when you’re selecting your white balance temperature is going to be your ambient light. That white balance value has given me the most realistic and most consistent results of realistic night sky color while preserving star color and foreground colors. However, I prefer to use a more exact starting point of five thousand five hundred degrees Kelvin. Since the night sky does cover a wide variety of blues and purples (depending on the ambient light and the moon phases) the Kelvin range will vary from four thousand to seven thousand. To understand the best value to use in night photography we need to narrow those values down a bit. Those values usually range from two thousand degrees Kelvin to nine thousand degrees Kelvin. If you have never heard of Kelvin temperature scales for setting your white balance, it is essentially a color grading scale that represents the color temperatures that are present in the image. To produce the correct white balance in night photography you need to use a Kelvin temperature white balance value. As I kept learning, I would strive for realistic night sky color instead of otherworldly color. Granted, when I started out with night photography I kept my white balance on AUTO and would welcome the deep blues and purples that the camera would produce. But, to take your night photos to an entirely new level you have to know the most important night photography settings. Yes, all of those things are crucial for night photography. I studied aperture, exposures, and ISO for night photography (by the way the most common setting used to shoot the night sky are 20 seconds, f/2, ISO 1600). Finally! A new challenge! Immediately, a million questions ran through my head on how to shoot something like that. I actually set my camera down for a while until I found a photograph of the Milky Way. There were no more challenges attached to photography. You work hard, you try new things, and you master your own personal brand of photography, developing your own style Afterwards, you’d seek out the great light of sunrises and sunsets. Then, you began wondering why your photographs lacked dynamic range and interesting color. If you’re anything like most photography enthusiasts, you probably started out shooting during bright sunlit hours while avoiding clouds and the corners of the day. Photography has an extremely interesting progression of learning attached to it.
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