Night landscape photography can be challenging to get right straight away. Most photographers find the difference in available natural light difficult.
But with the right knowledge, you’ll get the hang of it in no time. Continue reading for all of the tips and tricks you need to master nighttime landscape photography.
When I talk about “night landscape photography,” I mean shooting the starry sky with nighttime scenery. I do not mean astrophotography.
Astrophotography has its own set of challenges. But I still consider it easier than shooting night landscape photography for one simple reason. Exposure time is not an issue.
What makes night photography so challenging is the nighttime landscape. Following the stars blurs the landscapes. Following the nighttime landscapes will blur the stars. To record stars as fixed points rather than trails, you are forced to use a short exposure time.
It’s becoming more and more difficult to find a really dark sky. This is due to increased light pollution. It comes from city lights almost everywhere across the world.
The best thing you can do is to travel as far as possible from large cities and towns. Look for dark countryside. To get an idea of the light pollution in the world, visit the Light-Pollution Map website. There you can also see how light pollution has changed over the last five years.
I live in Belgium, under one of the most polluted skies in Europe. Even when I travel far away from the major cities, the darkest sky I can achieve will score a 5 or 9 on the Bortle scale. Still, as we will see, there is hope. You can capture satisfying night landscapes, even in light-polluted locations.
Unfortunately, the universe is quite indifferent to your photography needs. Which stars and how much of the Milky Way you can see depends on the time of the year. It also depends on your location on Earth.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the galaxy core is visible in the night sky from April until late September. How much of it you can see, and its height above the horizon will depend on your latitude. The closer you are to the Equator, the better.
Moving north, the core becomes lower and lower in the sky until it reaches a point just above the horizon. This is where the orange glow from light pollution is at its max.
During winter, the nights are longer. The core appears below the horizon, visible from the Southern Hemisphere only.
There are plenty of websites and mobile apps that calculate the location of the core. They will let you know in advance if, when, and how much of the core you will see from a given location.
You should also focus some of your attention on the nighttime landscapes. A good location isn’t only about the stars but also the nighttime scenery you will include.
If you are on a budget like most of us, fear not. You will still get plenty of amazing shots of that majestic starry night. You just have to follow some simple rules.
Gear does contribute to amazing shots. It’s not all about it, but it does play a role. The night landscape image comprises planning, composition, editing skills, and gear.
Here are the things you need to be able to wet your feet in night photography.
Full-frame cameras are the best here. This is because of the low noise at high ISOs. But modern APS-C or Micro Four Thirds cameras work too.
Let’s be honest here: you can take amazing shots even with one of the latest high-end compact cameras. Make sure it’s sporting a wide, fast lens and a 1-inch sensor.
There is much more than “pixel” quality when it comes to making a photo a good photo. More important than the sensor size are the following:
For compact cameras, you need a wide and fast lens as well as manual focus. Some form of focus peaking or live view magnification is a nice feature. It will help you to focus properly on the stars.
The most important feature of a good lens is the “speed.” An aperture in the f/1.4 to f/3.5 range is a “fast” lens. That’s because the aperture is big and lets enough light in to use a fast shutter speed.
It should allow you to focus manually. And it should have good optical performance such as sharpness, vignetting, chroma, and astigmatism when used wide open.
As for the choice of the focal length, for night landscape photography, the wider, the better. I would not go longer than 50mm on a full-frame camera. And the option to mount filters is a plus.
Let’s be clear here. You cannot shoot a night landscape without a tripod. You will need a sturdy one to avoid camera shake.
A good choice is one that allows you to shoot from down low to up above your head. This will give you maximum flexibility when composing your shot.
A loop or hook where you can attach a weight can be beneficial. This will help stabilize the tripod in windy conditions. These are common in coastal and mountainous locations.
Other materials:
Yes, filters. This is an important lesson on how to shoot at night to get the image you want.
These are by no means a substitute for a dark sky. But filters can help fight the evil orange glow present due to light pollution.
Here is the transmission spectrum for my Skywatcher LPR (Light Pollution Reduction) filter. See where the line drops? The filter will absorb that wavelength of light and will not reach the sensor.
To give you an idea of my equipment at the moment, I am using the following gear:
There are a few simple empirical rules to learn so you know how to properly look at the night sky. As I mentioned above, stars move across the sky at about 15 degrees per hour.
If you’re not interested in recording star trails, your exposure time should be short. But how short should it be exactly?
A simple way to estimate what the exposure time (ET) should be is to solve the following equation:
ET = N / ( CF * FL )
N (the detail in which your image will be displayed) can be 400, 500 or 600. CF is the crop factor for your camera. And FL the focal length of your lens. The choice of N depends on what you want to do with your photo.
For a website, go with N=600. You will get short trails with the stars appearing as dots in a small image with a low resolution. Do you want to print your photo in large format? Go with N=400, and you will have pretty much no trails at all.
I tend to use N=500 as I find it to be a good compromise. For example, for my Olympus EM-10, the CF=2, and I have the following max ETs for the following lenses:
1) Samyang 7.5 f/3.5, ET = 500 / ( 2 * 7.5 ) ~ 33 sec.
2) Samyang 12 f/2, ET= 500 / ( 2 * 12 ) ~ 21 sec.
If I used my old Zuiko 50mm f/1.4, my exposure time would be just 5 seconds. This is why telephoto lenses are less useful than wider ones.
Once you know your ET (exposure time), work with the ISO to expose your photo correctly. Keep an eye on the histogram.
A good starting point is given by using an ISO value calculated with the following equation:
ISO = (6000 * f 2) / ET
Here, f2 is the f-number (aperture value) squared.
Let’s take my Samyang 12mm f/2.0 on my Olympus OM-D (CF=2). With an ET of 21 seconds, a good value for the ISO should be ISO = 6000 * (22) / 21 = 1142, rounded up to ISO 1150.
If, say, the aperture was set to f/4.0 instead of f/2.0, the ISO would need to be: ( 6000 * (4.0 2) / 21, OR ( 6000 * 16 ) / 21 = 4571.
With digital sensors, it is better to expose to the right (ETTR) of an image. Overexpose it a bit to register the maximum amount of data possible in the camera. Then correct the exposure in post. This way, you don’t lose out on detail.
Another welcome effect of the ETTR method is that there will be less digital noise due to the high ISO settings. Underexposing overexposed photos results in considerably less noise in the final image. Don’t increase the exposure of an underexposed one.
Don’t be afraid to use high ISO settings (3200 and above) if that’s what you need. There are methods for dramatically reducing digital noise in post.
1. Make a checklist: you don’t want to arrive at the location and discover you are without batteries or memory cards.
2. Find the location: if you have no idea where to go, start looking at one of the light pollution maps available online. Find a dark region. Use social networks such as G+ or photo-sharing websites like Flickr and 500px. You can see if there are any worthy night landscapes within your chosen dark region.
Use Google Maps. Move around and zoom in and out to see if anything catches your attention. Once you have a location, learn about it.
Is the sky dark enough? Are there major cities visible or nearby? Will the Milky Way and the galaxy core be visible from that location, and at what time? In which phase will the moon be? What will the weather be like?
You can answer all these questions from the comfort of your couch long before you head out. Use apps and software such as Dark Sky, Stellarium, Skywalk, PhotoPills, PlanIt! for photographers, and The Photographer’s Ephemeris.
Look up the latest weather report, the forecast, and a moon calendar on the internet. Most software and apps cannot show you the real horizon. Be careful when determining whether the galaxy core will be visible.
3. Know your lens’ field of view: this is important if you plan to shoot for panorama stitching. It enables you to rotate the camera at night, relying on the graduated scale on the head of your tripod.
4. Know where the infinite for your lens is: in broad daylight, manually focus your lenses to the infinite. Mark the position on the lens barrel. More often than not, the factory mark for the infinity is off. Doing this during the day avoids wasting time struggling to do so in your dark location.
5. Clean your lenses: another job that is better to get done in daylight and at home.
6. Arrive early at your destination: so as to be able to explore the location in daylight. Look for possible compositions to create great daytime landscapes. Use the night augmented reality in apps like PhotoPills. You can preview how the sky will appear for the chosen night landscape composition.
It’s just like daylight landscapes. You can follow or break the composition rules. The only challenge you have here is lighting the landscape in front of you with limited focal lengths. Long telephotos will reduce your exposure time, as discussed above.
Framing an interesting composition with the Milky Way (or the Polar Star) is not hard. It’s like including the sun at a particular point in the sky in a daylight landscape. All you have to do is wait for the right period of the year and time of day.
If you are composing your image with star trails in mind, here’s a good rule of thumb. Try to have Polaris (northern hemisphere) or Sigma Octantis (southern hemisphere) in the frame.
Trails will appear as concentric circles centered on these stars. Star trails will look different depending on what direction you’re pointing your camera in.
You may want to experiment a bit to work out which kind of trails will best suit your composition. Another thing to consider when composing your shot is the following
A magnificent sky with a pitch-black landscape as a foreground tends not to work unless you are aiming for a silhouette against the sky.
Before you begin, lower the LCD brightness to the minimum. This gives you a better idea of the brightness of your image and stops you from being blinded for five minutes every time you look at the screen!
Take a test shot to verify that you are using the correct camera settings for stars, that the focus is on the stars, and that the composition works. Next, decide whether you want to obtain star trails or star dots (and the Milky Way).
If you are shooting star trails, take a new test shot, this time several minutes long. Your image will be horribly noisy and probably overexposed. But this gives you an indication of what the trails will look like in your final image. It also shows you whether the Polaris (the South Star) is in the frame or not.
Next, make sure that you have turned off any long-exposure noise reduction. Your battery must be fully charged and your memory card empty with enough space to record plenty of images.
If only it were true that you could record star trails by shooting a single photo with a nighttime long-exposure. Only using film can do this in reality.
In practice, leaving your digital sensor on record for a very long period of time results in it heating up. This causes purple hot pixels and luminance noise, which cripple your image quality.
You are better off using an intervalometer, and taking a huge number of relatively short exposures, say 30 to 60 seconds. Then you can stack them together in post-production to give you your trails. You may want to allow a few seconds between each shot to give the sensor time to cool down.
At the end of the sequence, put your lens cap on and take a photo. This is called a “dark frame,” which you can subtract from your stacking to help suppress hot pixels in your final image.
For decent trails, you need to record the sky for at least 30 minutes. The longer you record, the longer and more defined your trails will be. So you may wish to increase this time.
To avoid draining your battery too quickly, if you do not have a DSLR with an optical viewfinder, turn off the LCD screen in favor of the smaller electronic viewfinder if possible.
If your aim is to avoid star trails, you need to determine your maximum exposure time. Use the 600, 500, or 400 rule I introduced above. Adjust your ISO to expose to the right of your image.
Be careful to avoid blowing out the highlights and the horizon (usually the brighter part of the sky on a moonless night).
There are many reasons why you may want to shoot a panorama. The most obvious is to capture a scene that you cannot fit into a single shot. You may want to take the kind of “panorama” that you could get with a wider lens because your wider lens doesn’t allow you to mount an LPR filter.
Finally, you may intend to print the image in a very large format. Panoramas can have a resolution of up to a few hundred megapixels.
I mainly use panorama because, until now, I could only use my small 48mm LPR filter on the Sony RX100 Mk2.
For shooting panoramas, it is best to allow a superposition of 30-40% between shots. You’ll do best to know the angular field of view of your lens and rotate the camera by half of this value.
Since one tends to shoot panoramas with the camera mounted in portrait orientation, you will have to consider the vertical angle of view. For example, for my Samyang 12mm on the Olympus EM-10, the vertical angle of view is 58.72 degrees. This means I can rotate the camera by 30 degrees at a time. I can do this quickly and easily using the graduated scales on the tripod head (if you have them).
One of the best tips for shooting night landscape photography is the following. Whether you are shooting star trails, the Milky Way, or a night landscape panorama, you want to shoot multiple sets of images. One with the correct exposure for the sky and one to properly expose the foreground, for example. This allows you to get the best exposure across your final image through bracketing.
After photographing your night landscape in RAW format, you need to edit it.
I usually choose the white balance that best suits the image first. Then I fix the image exposure by adjusting the black and white points. Then I alter the highlights and shadows. Following this, I will make other minor adjustments, such as amending the contrast and so on. Nothing fancy.
Don’t be afraid to sharpen and micro-contrast (clarity) your sky. This makes the Milky Way and stars pop out, but be careful not to overdo it.
Sometimes you just have to accept that your location on the good Earth has not allowed you to get those incredible images of the colorful core of the Milky Way. And, no, the Universe is not conspiring against you… it is simply indifferent to your needs and wishes.
A big “don’t” is to assess the quality of your photos solely on the basis of pixel peeping. You already know that the sky will be super noisy when you blow your image up to full size. Do it to look at the improvements gained by applying the multi-frame noise reduction technique to reduce digital noise in your shots.
MFNR is a great technique to both clean photos of random digital noise and increase the details. The technique consists of shooting multiple shots of the same scene. Then you average them to smooth out the random digital noise while enhancing details.
In practice, MFNR will improve the signal-to-noise ratio. If nothing moves, MFNR is straightforward. Simply stack the images as individual layers in Photoshop and blend them using either the “mean” or “median” mode.
The median mode is a bit better at reducing ghosting. The improvement in photo quality is dramatic, as you can see in the comparison below.
Here, I took eight indoor shots on my Sony RX100 Mk2 at f/2.0 | 1/30 s | ISO 12,800. The photo is a 100% crop. The top half shows the image without any noise reduction, while the bottom half shows the final result after using all 8 shots to perform MFNR. I guess the results speak for themselves.
There’s a lot to consider when shooting nighttime landscape photography. If you’re not sure what you’re doing, it can seem impossible. But armed with the right tips, you can take mesmerizing night landscape photos!
Go out and capture the beauty of that starry night above your head!
