night photography – In Photos dot Org

Celestial Circles

The sun was particularly active last weekend, promising spectacular aurora with KP values of over 7. Unfortunately, the expected nighttime display failed to materialise. Instead, I swung my camera around and took 10 30-second exposures of the night sky, with the trees of a nearby road.

After combining them in Photoshop this is what you get. Not bad for 300 seconds.

Star trails form circular patterns around the celestial pole due to the Earth’s rotation, and in the Northern Hemisphere, these circles are centred on Polaris, the North Star, which barely moves at all in the sky. I wasn’t sure where Polaris was, but it looks like it’s just off the photo.

Aperture	ƒ/2.8
Camera	ILCE-7RM5
Focal length	24mm
ISO	1600
Shutter speed	30s

Green Light Go

One more from last week. This time, the long exposure shot is of a bus heading to Parnell Place in Cork. The traffic light had just turned green, so the bus was driving slowly, accelerating as it went. It made a colourful impression on the digital sensor of my camera!

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	ILCE-7RM5
Focal length	24mm
ISO	50
Shutter speed	4s

Light Trails on Eamon de Valera Bridge

Evening traffic whizzes past last week. Just after the sun had set, but the street light above my head hadn’t come on yet, so I got a nice long exposure.

How does photography affect your memory? Interesting podcast episode.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	ILCE-7RM5
Focal length	33mm
ISO	50
Shutter speed	8s

Night Shifts and Trailing Lights

Construction signs on Parnell Bridge in front of Cork City Hall were lit up by a passing bus a few nights ago.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	ILCE-7RM5
Focal length	24mm
ISO	50
Shutter speed	6s

Trácht ar Mhalairt Slí

If the road works, why are there signs pointing out where diverted traffic goes?

Did you know that most street signs in Ireland are bilingual? As Gaeilge on top and English below.

Thanks Henry, for the company last night. A good spot to do long exposure photography.

Oh, here’s something interesting about this photo. It’s made of two images I had to merge together in Photoshop because my long exposure shot wasn’t long enough. Two 4 second shots of a slowly moving bus on a corner.

Set the layer type of the top layer to “screen” and the lights in the air come through.

The resulting tiff file was 318.7MB. That’s a monstrosity for a simple image so I converted it to DNG which resulted in a 233.3MB file, and then to lossy DNG. That squeezed it down to 7.5MB! Not bad for a 9417×6278 image.

I couldn’t see any difference in image quality. There were slight differences when I clicked the auto Transform button, but nothing major.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	ILCE-7RM5
Focal length	29mm
ISO	50
Shutter speed	6s

The world in reflection

On a cold December night in 2018, I was taking photographs of reflected light in the puddles of the Docklands in Cork along with others from Blarney Photography Club.

Henry would have been on the light stick, and I’m sure I’ve posted other photos from the night, over the years as the lights are striking.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	ILCE-7M3
Focal length	17mm
ISO	50
Shutter speed	30s

Steel Wool Spinning at Night

Spinning flaming steel wool around creates fiery trails in the air. Thanks Henry, for this photo I took in 2015!

Aperture	ƒ/4
Camera	Canon EOS 6D
Focal length	40mm
ISO	50
Shutter speed	13s

Reflections on Wilton Terrace

A glass fronted building on Wilton Terrace is reflected in the waters of the canal in Dublin earlier this month. I thought it might be the Canadian Embassy, but Google Maps shows it’s a slightly different building.

Aperture	ƒ/2.2
Camera	Galaxy S23 Ultra
Focal length	2.2mm
ISO	1600
Shutter speed	1/8s

The Malaga Promenade

The Palmeral de Las Sorpresas, a promenade on Malaga Harbour is all lit up at night, with Malaga Cathedral in the background. All reflected in the water of the harbour.

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	ILCE-7M3
Focal length	75mm
ISO	400
Shutter speed	2.5s

It’s clear outside!

Clear Outside is a handy Android app that will display weather information about the current location or a location of your choice.

It’s really useful for astrophotography, landscape or sunset/sunrise photography as it will display the cloud cover too. The first time I used the app was on a sunset shoot with Blarney Photography Club at Garrettstown Beach where a member of the club told us about it.

We were hoping to shoot the Milky Way later that evening but the sky was mostly covered by thick cloud. The app said that cloud would disappear by 10:30pm so after the sun set we went off to a local pub for some refreshments. I’m glad we stayed around. Later in the evening I looked out the back door and saw stars twinkling and we drove back down to the beach where we were presented with a beautiful Milky Way and a really dark sky!

Other useful Android apps to have with you are:

Golden Hour will help you plan your sunset or sunrise expeditions. Also check out Golden Hour Calculator,
The Photographer’s Ephemeris are both apps that will show you sunrise and sunset times. I only have the former as I used Amazon credits to buy it but from using TPE for desktop I can see both have similar functionality. Give both a go, you can always get a refund within the Play Store time limit.
Phototools is a useful app that I’ve used in the past to calculate the DOF (depth of field) of various lens settings but it also does more, including calculating ND filter times and sunset/sunrise times.

And further reading on astrophotography:

My friend Marcus has written a great intro to night photography you should read.
Avoid star trails using the 500 rule.
This article suggested stacking consecutive photos which I haven’t tried yet.
This is a comprehensive article on night photography. I like his suggestion on focusing. Stars are at “infinite” distance so you’d think that setting the focus at the infinity symbol would get crystal clear images but I find I have to move the focus back a little. I never thought to shoot at infinity during daytime and check where the focus marker was so I could replicate it at night.
I have a “nifty 50”. It’s the Canon 50mm f/1.8 which takes lovely sharp photos but 50mm isn’t quite wide enough for Milky Way photography. It never occurred to me that shooting a panorama using overlapping photos would produce such nice photos. The same site has a useful Milky Way exposure calculator, and an astrophotography 101 guide.
Nightscapes is a huge repository of information about night photography. I processed the Milky Way photo above with these tips in mind.
You could try exposing to the right (over exposing) but I’m not convinced that will help too much.
If you don’t have any lens filters then consider using bracketed photos to create a HDR sunset. The sunset photo above was created this way and while I think it’s a little too sharp and not perfect I still like it. I used the free Nik software to do this.

Phew. It’s raining outside, there’s been nothing but cloud for the last few days but I’ll be keeping an eye on my apps to see when it’s clear outside and I can shoot more stars!

Aperture	ƒ/8
Camera	Canon EOS 6D
Focal length	28mm
ISO	50