AstroPhotography: where autofocus fails
Photography is fairly easy to start off with, anyone with a camera or a good phone can click great pictures. This statement comes with a disclaimer though: Yes, anyone can click great pictures only until the device does the focusing for you. Manual focus and the number of good photographers drop to a handful. This is because focusing on a thing/subject manually is very difficult, needs very high accuracy and patience.
Astrophotography is one such genre where you can almost never use autofocus as stars are too dim and small for your camera to focus on. This blog just shows you some pictures I have clicked over time and maybe you could draw some motivation you were waiting, to get out and click.
Here you go, by yours truly :)
Well, this photo was clicked on a lunar eclipse and you’re just seeing one of the 1000 pictures I had to click, thanks to manual focus. Although the moon is easier to focus on than the stars, it is still not bright enough for autofocus to work(at least for my lens). I was sitting on the tank on my terrace to click these while my mom was constantly complaining about me staying out on a lunar eclipse :p The secret to clicking good pictures of the moon is to try to get your focus right, click a lot of pictures, and do not try to underexpose the picture too much. You’re going to almost certainly crop the image to a great extent and hence try to not click those pictures by hand.
All the below photos were clicked on a trip I took to Sikkim around a year ago. Living in a city since childhood, I hadn’t honestly seen those many stars in the sky ever. Clean air and bright skies, what a delight!
My hotel at Sikkim was in a valley. It was 5 pm. I decided that I’d go down there to get a few shots and it didn’t disappoint.
Let me tell you,
Stars are therapeutic.
As naively as people say “it must be edited”, you already know/will know that you cannot transform a picture from bad to best by only editing it. Editing only helps you to correct a few factors which you couldn’t get right while clicking. It just helps your photo become better from good. You can usually edit other aspects of a picture such as brightness and contrast and hence can afford to shake up a bit, although as I said before not too much. Focus is one area where you cannot goof up at all. A badly focused photo is irrecoverable because sharpening it is the only solution and it almost helps negligibly for me almost every time.
While doing astrophotography, we (photographers) tend to usually give too much importance to the stars and almost not care about a good foreground which is actually supposed to be the subject of your image. And to me, this is what separates a great picture from an ‘it’s just stars’ picture.
Some parting tips: Click many photos from different angles and perspectives, click many photos by tweaking focus just a little bit because your small camera screen might not always give out the truth. And well of course, for the hundredth time in this blog, get your focus right, in pictures and life :)
