How Can I Capture Star Trails

Here some tips how can you capture  star trails 

Now days auto focus is so good on modern mobile cameras that most photographers use it all the time. It seemingly never lets you down. But, let’s say it’s night time and you are going to do some shooting. You find a good spot. You set up your tripod. You go to focus your camera using the auto focus. You can feel the camera’s focus ring twisting back and forth, trying to focus. But it never gets there. The mobile camera keeps hunting for a focus spot but never finds one.

What are you going to do now?

1. Aim for the bright spot

Sometimes you can still use your auto focus. Even though it is dark, most night scenes will have a bright spot or two. They might be streetlights, or a lit-up building, or even the moon. That bright spot can be used to set your auto focus.

2. Focus on the edge

Don’t aim your focus point at the middle of the bright spot in your frame. Rather, focus on the edge of the bright point. The camera will use the contrast between the very light and the very dark tones to focus.

3. Use a flashlight

Shine your flashlight on your subject. That will lighten it up enough for the camera to focus on it. Set your focus, then you can turn off the flashlight and take your shot.

4. Recompose after focusing

Don’t refocus as you do so though – just move the camera and take the shot with the focus you’ve already set.

5. Use back-button focus

That way since your focus is not set with the shutter button, when you take the picture by pressing it there is no chance that your camera refocuses.

6. Manually focus using the lens scale

Use that to set the focus.

You might need a flashlight to see the scale.  This is yet another reason to keep a flashlight in your camera bag.