Photography Tips: Nightscape & Night Sky

One of the most difficult things when shooting nightscapes, astroscapes, or night sky photography is insuring you have sharp focus for those “pin point” stars. Most cameras struggle to acquire focus in dark circumstances and manually focusing is very difficult when there is virtually nothing bright to see.

Pre-Focus

One of the best ways to insure you will have sharp infinity focus is to set the focus during the day or when you know you will have something bright to focus on. Set infinite focus during the day aiming at a distance mountain range or other distant subject.

 

After the camera has acquired focus lock the lens focus barrel in place buy taping it down. Then set the camera and/or lens to “Manual Focus” so it won’t try to reacquire focus later. After taping the focus barrel in place check focus by shooting a few test images and review. If it’s off, reacquire focus by using the same steps again.

Bright Light Focusing

If pre-focusing does not work for you or you find that your pre-focus setting has been lost or wasn’t accurate, you can use a bright light source to focus on. Sometimes a distant road can provide bright headlights to focus on, a street light in the distance, partial or full moon, or even a bright star or planet (Jupiter, Venus or Saturn) can be used as a reference for focus. Sometimes you may need to ask a friend to carry a bright flashlight out into the distance to focus on. If alone you may need to set a light in the distance, return to the camera and lock in your focus, then retrieve the light. I’ve used the headlights of my car for a focus source in the distance (when visible) by pressing the “Lock/Unlock” button on the key fob to flash the headlights long enough to achieve focus.

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