Learn And Guide Milky Way Photography

I'm gonna teach you guys how to shoot the Milky Way. The first thing you need is a tripod because your shutter speed is gonna be longer than what you can hold and if you don't have a tripod your pictures are gonna turn out blurry first piece of gear

your second piece of gear is a DSLR or mirrorless camera with the wide-angle lens now when I'm out in the field I'm gonna be shooting with a full-frame camera but if you're shooting with the crop sensor

this is important to know whatever focal length that says on your camera that you're shooting you want to times that by 1.5 to get the actual focal length.

When you determine your shutter speed you're gonna use the focal length as part of the formula so you don't want to know that if you are shooting a crop sensor camera before you do the math to determine your shutter speed you're gonna want to times your focal length by 1.5 the next thing you want to know is where do you shoot the Milky Way in the United States there we have a an app called the dark site finder you want.

To go on there and find out the dark skies closest to where you're located now the best time to see the core of the Milky Way in the northern hemisphere is in the summertime from April till about

November you want a moonless clear night and you want to be facing south south

east or later in the summer you wanna be facing Southwest to get the best shot of the Milky Way on a clear night now.

Since I decided to live in myself on time we're gonna have to teleport over to the

field so let's go alright so we made it out here and the first thing we want to do is see where the Milky Way is gonna come up and when what we're gonna do is

when I log into our photo pills app go under the moon pill and it's gonna show We got a waxing crescent moon which is it like 3.3% so this is actually gonna be perfect the moon's gonna set at nine

o'clock an hour about five hours before we're even gonna take a picture so we're gonna have completely dark skies you can have a little bit of light pollution from Sedona right there but that's gonna be it and so now all we're doing is we're gonna wait so when the milky way comes out we're gonna be ready and then we're gonna talk about settings all right guys welcome back so the first

thing.

I want to talk about is how to get your focus and at night there's two ways to do it now you can well there's probably more than that but the two ways that I use is you can either in the daytime focus on something as far away as possible put your piece of gaffers tape on the focus ring so that it won't

move that way you had your focus set you'll have to worry about it the second is to actually zoom in on your on the back of your screen.

Oh you're gonna focus on the brightest star zoom all the way in and then adjust your focus on the back of the screen here to get that dot as small as possible now once you've done that let's talk about settings now.

I'm obviously at the widest angle as possible what you only do is you take your aperture aperture open it up as much as it'll go if it's 2.8 open all the 2.8 it's 3.5 open it all the way up to 3.5 very simple now your shutter speed you use what's called the 500 rule you take 500 and divide it by your focal length so I mean shooting to 15 millimeters do you want to do 500 divided by 15 is gonna be about 30 seconds you the reason why you want to do that is because anything longer than that you're gonna get what's called star trails and that's due to the movement of the the stars you want to keep those stars.

That sharp as possible so keep it under 30 seconds now I'm shooting a higher megapixel camera so it's actually gonna be different in the 500 doesn't work but for any kind of crop sensor or anything like 24 megapixels that the 500 rule will be just fine so if you're at 24 millimeters then you're gonna want to use about 20 seconds so figure out your shutter speed set that the last thing you're gonna set is your ISO what I have to start out with is mm shoot that take a picture see what that looks like you have to adjust the ISO up or down but keep those other two settings exactly the same very simple you got your Milky Way so you got to do from

There you can experiment a little bit so that's it guys pretty simple so I'm gonna sit around I'm gonna do some more shots here I'm gonna give you guys an oq a time-lapse and yeah do some