The night sky is a beautiful picture. You will be filled with awe as you gaze at the starry night sky. Do you want to know how big the universe is, how many stars are in the sky, and how far they are from you?
It is very difficult to capture the stars in the sky, but you can also use a mobile phone to shoot a large star trail full of science fiction and space. The premise is that you have to do the following preparations:
1. It is important to choose a nice weather and shooting environment
If you want to take starry sky pictures, you need to shoot in fog-free weather. In this kind of weather, the water mist in the air will be thinner, and there will be a more transparent effect so that the starlight in the sky can more easily penetrate the atmosphere and be photographed by mobile phone.
We should also pay attention to shooting when there is no moon or a waning moon as much as possible. When the moonlight is too strong, it will still cause light pollution to the shooting environment which leads to bad results.
Therefore, it is better for us to choose to stay away from the city and find a rural or suburban hillside, and these areas are usually with less light pollution to shoot. But you should also pay attention to safety issues, so maybe ask some friends to keep you company.
2. To take a clear starry sky blockbuster, it is necessary to maintain the stability of the mobile phone
This is the same requirement as shooting the starry sky with a camera. During shooting, we need to keep our phones as stable as possible, so that the photos taken in this way will not appear trailingly.
Shooting the starry sky at the same time requires long exposures, and if you shoot hand-held, the photos can easily be blurred.
Therefore, whether we use a mobile phone or a camera to take pictures of the starry sky or star trails, we need to prepare a tripod. You can also prepare a remote shutter release cable for a mobile phone camera.
At this time, we only need to set the parameters of the mobile phone and put it on a tripod. When the time is right, press the shutter button.
3. How to set the parameters when shooting star trails with a mobile phone
This requires us to use the professional photography mode of the phone. When we enter the professional photography mode of the mobile phone, we can set the ISO between 400-3200, which can be set according to the light conditions of the environment.
The shutter speed can be set between 10-30S, and the focusing method can use the default automatically. If you need to use manual focusing, you must set the focus at an infinite distance.
We can take a test shot first. If you find that the starry sky photo is a little blurry, then pull the focus mode back one or two bars and try again until the starry sky is clear.
You can select the white balance as cloudy mode, or set it around 3000-4000K manually. In this way, the starry blue effect will be very beautiful. You can also choose the default effect, then use the software to adjust the color.
If you want to take a photo with super visual impact, remember to use the ultra-wide-angle lens of your phone. In this way, you will have a photo with a wide-screen field-of-view effect.
4. Use post-production to enhance the overall effect of the photo
After taking a picture of the starry sky with our phone, we always find that some photos don't work as expected. At this time, you can try to use mobile phone photo editing software, such as snapseed, to enhance the starlight effect in the photo, and improve and optimize the overall tone of the photo. Try this, and you will have an even better photo effect.
5. Keep in mind the time-lapse photography function that comes with your phone
We can also turn on the time-lapse photography function to shoot a time-lapse video.
You can set the interval shooting time or the variable speed magnification to be larger for time-lapse photography so that the effect of the starry sky and the universe with the shutter moving in the sky will have more visual impact.
