I want clear one concept in AstroPhotography with an object in foreground. When I tried to capture the milky way with focus on infinity and 20 sec of exposure. I went pefect.  But when I tried to capture the milky way with my friend holding torch in foreground, his picture was blurry everytime.  Kindly help me out, how to take a person and milky way both in focus and clear, that too in one shot.   I've attached a picture for example.    Thanks n BR, Prashant
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I went out and captured the Milky Way and because I have a 18mm-55mm 1: f3.5 5.5 lens I had to turn the camera sideways and stitch them together in photoshop and just having to work with what I got at the moment until I can afford something better but I was really happy with how it turned out! but I'd like to take it to the next step and maybe have a foreground or myself in the picture. So this brings me to the question, How do people capture the Milky Way/stars with themselves in it so clearly or sitting around the fire without it being over exposed. Is this through post processing and how do they do this, I can't necessarily completely understand how to do it. Such like these:
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I came across some really cool  today. How did he manage to get these photos? I couldn't find any EXIF information anywhere, and I don't have enough experience with macro to figure out how he did it.  It's obvious that the light has a lot to do with the result. How and what kind have been used? And what kind of camera equipment?
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I have made a mistake with this image:    ISO 400 | 1/1700s | f/2  I used manual Aperture mode and set it to F/2 (now I believe this is too much). Kids were one meter away. It was light cloudy morning.  However, they came out blurred - and the trees behind appear in focus. I was using auto-focus mode, and I think the focus was in the middle of the photo - but between the kids :(  How come my camera auto-focused the trees behind with f/2 (i was expecting this aperture works for close objects?). Was this only a miss-focus, or my aperture was wrong as well? What should I do next time?
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The title says it pretty much all. I'm asking this because I find myself always using the focus point in the center, and after I focused, I rotate my camera to make the framing right. However, if lenses do create a plane in which everything is sharp, then the focus will be slightly off after rotating the body.  Doing some maths: if I focus at distance x meters, and rotate my camera for alpha radians, then the focus plane would be off for:  ∆f = x*tan(alpha/2)*tan(alpha)   So, let's plug in: x = 2 meters, alpha = 20 degrees = 0.349 radians, we get: ∆f = 0.128 meters. So this means, my optimal focus point is now almost 13 centimeters away from the original focus point.  If they are not spherical, I will experience my focus being off. So is it safe to use other focus points except for the one at the center and immediately put my framing right? This will slow down the process of taking pictures?
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I have a Canon 60D that I use for my primary hobby that is photography, but sometimes the pictures that I took are with the incorrect exposure like this:    So I want to know how I can choose the correct exposure for situations like night, intense light, poor light conditions...  PS: The image is intentionally unfocused because I was playing with styling my photos a bit, not that it's a problem.
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How can I take a photo which shows the skyline and the person who is standing around six feet away from the camera with proper lighting at night?   For taking just the skyline I've used long shutter speed and it turned out great, but when including a person on it, the person becomes  blurry because it's impossible for a person to remain static for that long.   Ps.  I do have two flashes, 35mm prime lens as well as 18-300mm zoom lenses as well. The camera I use is Nikon D7200.
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On the kit 18-55 lens that came with my Nikon D5100 I have noticed that when trying to focus on infinity for shots in dark conditions (star-trails, etc) the lens tends to move past infinity out of focus and need to be brought back a little to get a clear infinity focus point.  Is there a good trick for getting a clear infinity focus when in pitch dark conditions?
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I have a Canon 20D. I'd love to take some photos of the moon and stars.   How do I get started?  I've search the web and the information is sparse and cryptic.   I'd like to know what equipment is the best for a beginner and what I should try taking a photo of first... besides the moon :).
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I have a kit lens which has no markers. What would be a recommended way to find infinity focus on this lens?  I plan to shoot objects at night -- not necessarily stars or the moon. So, adjusting the focus using the viewfinder may not be an option.
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Many photos of Milky-way show it in nice colors instead of just the black of sky and white of the stars. Is the key to having those colors in the capturing of the image or in the post processing, or both? Or am I just doing it in a wrong time of year when the visible part of Milky-way is simply not showing color?  Here is a sample photo of how Milky-way looks like in Finland in September:    APS-C sensor camera, 18 mm, 30 sec, f/3.5, ISO 3200 - captured in pitch-black darkness of Finnish countryside, far far away from any citylights, at time when moon was still below visible horizon.  What I'd like to achieve is something like the photo in Vivek's answer to   I've just bought a wireless shutter release for longer bulb exposures, and have plans to build a barn-door tracking mount. But is longer exposure the needed trick, or what is?
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In optimal world I would buy a lens that is good in every way. But I'm on a budget and have to find a balance in quality and price. I'm looking for a lens for star photography, so in my case it will be a wide angle lens with good characteristics for capturing points of light in a dark sky. What would those characteristics be?  So far I've learned about , which seems like a thing to note when comparing different lenses for star photography. It would be quite disappointing if stars turned into long teardrops on the edges of a photograph even when every precaution was taken to make all stars sharp round points of light.  Vignetting would be an example of lens characteristic not so important in this use.  Many characteristics of a lens turn better when aperture is slightly stopped down, but I suppose I'd be wanting to use a lens with wide open aperture when trying to capture the stars in a dark night sky.  I'm not asking for lens recommendations. But, as an example of what kind of lenses I've been looking at, I name  manual focus lens. Its price level is $350'ish in Amazon and seems to run with name Rokinon too. It seems to be reasonably sharp even when wide open - my camera is an APS-C sensor camera.
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I was trying to take some nice pictures of the Toronto city skyline from the shores of Lake Ontario under a full moon night. Now I put my nikon d5200 on a tripod and set f/4 and shutter = 30 sec. I am using 18 mm focal length. But from time to time, it tells me that 'Subject is too Dark' and the shutter won't even press all the way down!  I am in 'M' mode.  The lens keeps rotating clockwise and counterclockwise to try and focus and gives up.  How to get around this? Do I need to experiment with manual focus? The funny thing is I point the camera directly at the bright full moon and still it says 'Subject too Dark'.  Now the funny thing is that when I look at exposure meter in view finder , it shows that the image is over exposed by 3 bars. And I expect this while looking at a full moon for 30 sec with a wide aperture.    How can it be overexposed and still be Too Dark ?
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Take an FF body and a crop body, with similar MP rating - and the FF body will give a sharper image of the same object. At least, that seems to be the case - as here:    I assume a low ISO was used in both images.  Why does the FF body, with the same lens and almost the same MP, give an image that is so much sharper?   My best guess is that the diffraction / airy still play a role, and the larger pixels reduce effective overlap - thus increasing contrast/sharpness by displaying less of the neighboring diffraction, as below?
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I want to make a full focus on the body, for example: I need to have a clear focus on the each balls in the photo. I used just single point focus.    In this picture I used:   shutter speed: 8 aperture: F/4 ISO: 200 2 flashes, one in the right and one on the top of project camera: nikon d300s lens : 105mm micro 2.8   Thanks
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I'm trying to see how  correlates with practice. That answer basically says I need to let enough light into the camera and then use the highest ISO value and I'll get the lowest noise then.  So I make two shots with the same camera. Camera has aperture set to a specific value, fully manual mode, camera is on a tripod and focused onto a specific faraway object. Shooting is done around midnight, so it's rather dark. The scene is a large industrial building standing faraway across a field from the camera. The field has no light sources, all lights are on the industrial building.  I dunno if it's important but images are written as JPEG inside camera - no shooting to raw and external post-processing. Maybe that's why I see my unexpected result.  Camera highest ISO value is 3200 (not using extended ISO values).  So I first shoot with ISO 1600 and shutter speed set to 1/125 second and then I shoot with ISO 3200 and shutter speed set to 1/250 second. The amount of light should be identical and indeed both shots look properly exposed and exposed the same way.  When I open the pictures in an image viewer and zoom in to one hundred percent  I see that ISO 1600 shot is much cleaner than one with ISO 3200. I checked that several times and I'm sure - it's not the other way around.  Why is this? Is this because of post-processing difference?
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Another question asks,  Rather than the background, I am interested in blurring the foreground. What techniques or advice are different for achieving sharp subjects with strongly blurred foregrounds? Note that I'm not asking how to use an editing program to achieve this effect after in post production or after the image is captured. I am using a Nikon D7200 with an AF-S 18-140 mm VR Lens
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I am quite new to photography and was looking into how I can take better indoor photographs, particularly around night time.  I'm currently in a hotel room for the night and decided to try and take a picture of my room to test out my tripod which I haven't used before. However I noticed no matter what I set my camera settings to the artificial lights (particularly the lamp on the left, image attached) just appeared very washed out. You can't tell any detail about the lamp shade all you can see is just some sort of light but not much to it.  I tried a variety of fstop/shutter speed settings and tried a variety of ISO settings but they all appeared pretty much the same unless I massively underexposed the image.  Given that I wondered whether the solution would be to take a HDR image or take a normal exposure and an underexposed image and blend them later? I understand that artificial light like this can be very hard and harsh but I wondered if there's a way of improving the result with looking away from it?  I wasn't trying to take any particular special picture here but just test out my camera a bit more but this was the first thing I noticed and I didn't know how to fix it. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.