Night Start trail and timelapse - The guideline for beginners [2020]

Learn star trails photography and Timelapse video making

Star Trails  Timelapse Photography – The Beginning Guidelines [2020

Learn star trails photography camera settings and photo editing, in this step-by-step, easy to understand tutorial, for all skill levels.

Table of Contents

Camera Equipment for Star Trails Photography
Provided below are the minimum requirements to start taking star trail photos.

View the brands and equipment I use and recommend on the Night Sky Photography Camera and Lens Recommendations & What’s In My Camera Bag pages.

Minimum Requirements
Tripod: A well made and sturdy tripod is very important for star trail photography.

Cheap tripods usually shake and vibrate easily, making your pictures blurry.

Camera with Manual Mode Functionality: “M” or manual camera mode means you can manually, and independently adjust the Aperture, ISO, and Exposure settings on the camera.

Camera Timer / Intervalometer: A timer is essential for star trail photography.

In short, a camera timer / intervalometer allows you to take multiple, long exposure photos, one after another. Most cameras only allow a 30 second maximum exposure time.

Fully Charged Batteries: Three to five fully charged batteries. You will be shooting over a time ranging from 30 minutes to 3 hours.

Wide Angle Lens (Optional): Star trail photography is much more forgiving than Milky Way photography.

A “fast” ( number under the “f” is small ) lens is still recommended.

The smaller the number under the “f”, the wider the aperture in your lens will open, allowing the most light to propagate through it in the least amount of time.

In turn more light will hit your camera’s sensor, providing a higher quality image at night.

For full frame cameras I recommend wide angle lenses between 14-24mm and f/4 minimum aperture.
For crop sensor cameras I recommend wide angle lenses between 8-20mm and f/4 minimum aperture.

Moon Phase & Dark, Clear Skies

Step 1 – Calculate the Moon Phase: Shooting under a 25% to full moon is ideal for star trails photography.

This allows the moon to light the entire landscape which provides added foreground detail to your images.
Shoot in the opposite direction of the moon, allowing your stars to be the brightest light in the sky.

Step 2 – Find Dark Skies: Blue Marble Light Pollution Map is a great website for finding dark sky locations near you.

Areas that are black are ideal for photographing the night sky, were white areas are light polluted and should be avoided.

Step 3 – Find Clear Skies & Predict the Weather: You will want to shoot with cloud cover percentages of 0 – 50% maximum for star trails photography. In video 1 below I teach this technique and provide more insight.

Preset Your Focus Point During the Day
It’s much easier to focus during the day than at night, for you and your camera’s autofocus software.

Step 1: Set up your camera during the day with the lens you will be using to take your night / low light photos. You can do this at your house, or anywhere else that’s easy, it doesn’t have to be at the location where you plan on taking your night photos.

You’ll want to open the lens to the widest focal length possible. For example, this would be 14mm on a 14-24mm lens.

Step 2: Adjust your lens to focus at infinity, or at a far away horizon. I always like to use my camera’s Live View Mode, zoomed in, and focus on the furthest horizon in my composition.

This will ensure that you’ve focused at infinity. You can also focus by looking through your camera’s view finder. This works very well too.

Step 3: Manually make the final adjustments if / as required using the focus ring.  I find that Auto Focus usually does very well during the day, but sometimes needs manual input to nail down the final focus in low light.

Step 4: Take some more practice shots at an aperture of f/8 – f/11 and make sure the entire photo is in focus. If it isn’t focused, repeat Step 2 and Step 3, until it is. This is your infinity focus point.

Step 5: Using a permanent marker ( silver sharpie is easy to see at night ), mark both the focus ring, and the barrel of the lens (non-rotating part of lens). Tape works as well, but may fall off over time.

Step 6: You found your infinity focal point for a given focal length. Remember! If you change your focal length your focal point will change as well. I shoot all my night sky photos at 14mm to make things easy:)