Exciting Nighttime Photography – Exposure

Nighttime photography – photographing the moon

There are many techniques involved in nighttime photography.  Star trail photographs are a traditional approach dating back to the film days.  If you think about it, that makes sense.  With the ISOs commercially available to most of us photographers, shooting the nighttime sky was not an option.  We simply didn’t have fast enough film.

With the advent of digital photography we can now push ISOs into the thousands and the noise levels are constantly improving.  And we can modify our cameras’ sensors to sensitize them to infrared light, something that the serious and most accomplished nighttime photographers do.  This provides us the opportunity to photograph both star trails and the night sky.

In previous articles I’ve discussed techniques for both types of nighttime photography.  In the most recent one I describe a technique that can provide both star trails and night sky photographs from a single session.  Here’s the link.

Exciting Nighttime Photography in 10 Easy Steps

One aspect I haven’t covered in detail yet is exposure.

Earlier this week there was a beautiful conjunction of the crescent moon and Venus in the early evening sky.  So I grabbed my camera, got permission from my neighbor and used their front yard to photograph the moon and Venus over the Los Angeles basin here in Southern California.

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Exciting Nighttime Photography in 10 Easy Steps

Here is a simple 10 step process to capture both star trails and nighttime sky photographs at the same time.

Nighttime photography is a lot of fun, gaining greater popularity and attracting more and more photographers.  I’ve been exploring the various techniques and want to share with you the one I like the most.  Now, I don’t pretend to be a master at nighttime photography.  I’ll leave that up to the legends like Wally Pacholka.  But we can still have a lot of fun and come away with some very nice images.

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Nighttime Photography

Here’s a technique for combining night sky and star trails photography that really works.

Back in January of 2010 I published a blog post titled.

Ten Tips for Exciting Nighttime Photography

Now, I don’t profess to be an expert on nighttime photography.  But the month of October provided a number of great opportunities to do some night shooting with some people who know what they are doing.  October started off with a trip to Grand Portage in Northern Minnesota near the Canadian border.  There I shot with Travis Novitsky and my brother Roger Nordstrom.  Both are experienced at shooting star trails.  And my friend Wally Pacholka is world renown for his astrophotography.  And while I haven’t had the pleasure of photographing with Wally I figure during the associations I’ve had with him something must have rubbed off.

I’ve put together some thoughts on nighttime photography that I’d like to share with you.

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