How to Photograph Star Trails | Night Photography Series 

Show me a location in Brooklyn or Manhattan with clear unpolluted sky. It's my dream but cannot hire a driver going 4 hours away from the city in the middle of the night.

My wife and I enjoy doing night time photography at Badlands National Park, we’ve experimented with star trails and some light painting. We just started night photography last year and still learning, we need Gabe to produce more quality videos like this one to teach and inspire us.

Thanks for watching.

@@raymondlarsen2777 - Thank you - I'm on it plus we have lots of night photography videos on the National Parks at Night Channel as well!

@@Mr.HarryPotter - Indeed, too bring in NYC but plenty of camping outside of NY via the train or bus! Need to go to where the stars can be seen!

Thanks for tuning in.

Thank you Marcelo! Sony stood up like a champ in the snow!

Thank you for your comment.

Indeed, shorter star point shots can be "stacked" for longer trails in PS or StarStax as well! Have fun with the auroras!

For this inquiry, please e-mail us directly to askbh@bhphoto.com. Thank you.

For star trails you should keep the interval in between shots as short as possible. I will usually set my intervalometer to 1 second, the shortest interval. Your aperture choice will dictate how many stars will appear in the sky. A fast aperture of 1.4, 2, 2.8 will let the dimmer stars appear brighter. This is good for star point photography, as we want to see every star in the Milky Way and beyond! But for star trails, too many stars can make the image seem too frantic. It all depends what mood you want the viewer to feel. My general rule of thumb is to shoot star trails under moonlight with an aperture of f/5.6. On most wide angle lenses this plays to the sweet spot of sharpness, good image quality, and a good amount of stars are "seen" in the sky that doesn't "overwhelm" the viewer. However, if you are shooting star trails when there is little to no moon, you might be forced to open up your aperture so that you can let as much light in as possible. I'd experiment to see how many star trails you like to show in a scene by doing several shots at different apertures as well as exploring the shooting under different phases of the moon, as each will challenge you to explore different night photography styles and solutions. In addition to the videos I created with B&H, you can learn more about night photography at www.nationalparksatnight.com

Actually I was about to ask the same, thanks for clarifying this

Surprised that he did 5.6 and not 2.8 is it increase the shutter to 239 seconds?

That's rough, hope you made the best of it anyway.

Although the presenter is using a 14-24mm which has a maximum aperture of f/2.8 to allow for great low light performance, you can still using something like an 18-140mm lens being that wide angle lenses are preferred for these types of shots.

Which photo are you referring to?

Always 1 second max between shots

It is a single shot. >Mark

Possibly. Please-mail us: askbh@bandh.com >Mark

Try bumping your iso down. I generally shoot at 1600 on my a7ii. And even at 28mm, i shoot around 15-17 sec without noticeable star trail, unless you zoom in.

Also, is there a lot of light pollution or a moon present? That will change things drastically. If light pollution is the issue, you can find good light pollution filters for a decent price, which will filter out a lot of the frequencies produced by artifical light. If it's caused by moonlight, then you'll want to shoot before or after moonrise and moonset, or wait for a new moon

ah i see...30 seconds for the individual shots, but then it was stacked...gotcha

If you need to reach out to Gabe you can email socialmedia@bhphoto.com and we can forward the message to him.

@@BandH Thanks, i'll do that. I asked a question and he was good enough to reply but his emails are not getting delivered.