The big dipper!

I'm not looking into starting taking star photos, but I would love to hear what you would change in processing or composition/camera settings. It will be interesting to hear your input
Thanks!

It might look wierd, I was kinda lazy when removing a few stars with the spot removing tool, so it's not so refined

This one is not so much focused on the big dipper, I actaully noticed it in the sky just after the photo

Thank you!
I'm actually not experienced myself, I do believe that it is important to avoid lightpollution as much as possible. For instance, I went into the woods late in the evening for these photos, I was situated in a dark are and aimed the camera away from the light sources coming from street lights. I was actually just 40 meters into the woods with my dog because I'm a bit of a coward xD.

When it comes to shooting it was a bit of trial and error since it's incredibly hard to see anything on the screen until the actual photo is seen on the screen after a longexposure shot.

I go to manual focus and focus infinity, in terms of aperture of what I heard you can actually shoot wide open since the stars from the viewpoint of earth is like a single plane(don't know how to explain), but I still chose F11. High ISO gave me alot of stars to work with in post processing, I've seen other settings from people shooting perhas 20 sec instead of 30 and ISO 6400.

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/51944903 <---- here's another guys photo from this forum, this for me was amazing. he had a lower f number and iso, i should have tried that this h

Keep Snappin'!

I recently began exploring star shooting as well. It's simultaneously more difficult and much easier than I imagined...

Thank you for sharing and bringing this to our attention!  I've been meaning to look into Astrophotography too (though I live in a very busy area where the sky is never dark enough).

Kemily01 wrote:

I recently began exploring star shooting as well. It's simultaneously more difficult and much easier than I imagined...

Nice, is that a satellite trace on the top right?

Im not sure to be honest.. My original assumption is that it was a shooting star, but since it started off frame its difficult to actually tell how long the trail was. But now that I think about it, it could definitely be a satellite. Good call!

Looks great! How was the area from where you were shooting

Ramon94 wrote:

Looks great! How was the area from where you were shooting

It was pretty dark.. this was taken in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas (about halfway between Sacramento CA and Lake Tahoe) at about 9-9:30PM. I was near a house which had a fair amount of ambient lighting which made it difficult to get my exposure dialed in properly.

I was also getting 3 or 4 hot pixels the longer I was shooting. I wasnt aware that LR auto corrected these so I stopped prematurely I think. Probably could have gone longer and tried some different lenses and techniques.