How to Photograph Stars with Kit Lens
Photographing stars with basic equipment can be fun. Ideally you should shoot at a dark site a long way from city lights, but even in the city suburbs you can get interesting shots. Of course one of the beauties of digital photography is that trial and error is easy - you can experiment with different exposures and get instant feedback. If you haven’t tried before, you can use the settings below to get you in the right ballpark - then just experiment from there.
I had a go at photographing the Orion constellation with a Pentax K100D and 18-55mm kit lens. The following shot was taken with exposure of 30 seconds at f5.6 ISO 1600.
- Camera Make: PENTAX Corporation
- Camera Model: PENTAX K100D
- Focal Length: 40.0mm (35mm equivalent: 60mm)
- Exposure Time: 30.000 s
- Aperture: f/5.6
- ISO equiv: 1600
- White Balance: Auto
- Metering Mode: Spot
- Exposure: Manual
- Exposure Mode: Manual
To get the halo of color round the stars, the focus was changed during the 30 second exposure by turning the focus ring of the lens several times manually while the shot was being taken. You need to be in manual focus for this and juts giv the focus ring a gentle turn every few seconds). This brings out the star colours, especially the orange colour of Betelgeuse. You can just see the pink glow of the Orion Nebula to the right of the “belt” - mind you I expected the pink colour to be more obvious. This is just a star trail shot where the trails are blurred by the defocussing of the lens.
The photo was taken from a suburban back yard 12km from city centre - it would look better from a darker site. You can get different effects by tweaking the exposure time and how much you change the focus during the exposure.
What exposure do you need for no star trails?
What if you want a shot with no obvious star trails? As a rough rule of thumb, the the exposure time for no trails is about roughly 700 divided by the focal length of the lens (or to be safe you could use a factor of 500 instead of 700). So for a 70mm lens, the maximum exposure time for no trails = 700 / 70 = 10 seconds. If you used a 200mm lens, you would get star trails after only 3.5 seconds. (This is not a precise rule- the actual time varies with the angle from the the celestial pole. The further you are from the pole, the more trails you will get in a given time. )