Usually, my camera lens is more busy with macro photography, getting very close to nature and finding the fine details of insects or leaves. The joy of finding vastness in a small world is different. But sometimes the infinite sky above my head also attracts me strongly. The dark nights of our village are like a perfect canvas for this attraction. Being located far away from the intense light pollution of the city, the night sky here is full of stars. And to frame this wonderful beauty, I went out with my old yet very powerful device, the Samsung Galaxy S10. In today's post, I will share with you how I captured our galaxy or Milky Way with a simple smartphone.
Preparation and camera settings
Taking astrophotography or taking pictures of the night stars on a smartphone is not like taking ordinary pictures. What is needed most here is steadiness and patience. The slightest hand shake can make the pictures of the stars become elongated or blurry. So first of all, I placed the phone very firmly on a tripod, so that it did not move even a hair.
Since the S10 phone does not have a separate 'astro mode' like the latest phones of today, I had to use the Pro Mode of the default camera. For those who want to try taking such pictures with their phones, I am sharing my manual settings below:
Focus: I moved the slider all the way to infinity using manual focus.
Shutter Speed: I set the shutter speed to the maximum, i.e. 30 seconds (30s), to give the lens the time to capture the maximum amount of light.
Aperture: I chose f/1.5 & f/2.4 aperture to allow the most light to enter in the darkness of the night.
ISO: I kept it between 1600 and 4000 based on the darkness around.
Timer: I set a 2-second timer so that the phone wouldn't shake even a little while I pressed the shutter button.
The waiting time and the first raw image (Raw Output)
Every 30 seconds of waiting after clicking the shutter button felt like an eternity. The pin-drop silence around and the silhouette of the dark trees created a very mysterious atmosphere. But when the first image appeared on the screen after processing, I was literally mesmerized. The image captured thousands of times more stars than the number of stars visible in the sky with the naked eye. Even a layer of our Milky Way galaxy, like a light haze of clouds, was clearly visible in the middle of the image. The black shadows or silhouettes of coconut and betel trees on one side of the frame made the vastness of the sky even more dramatic.
However, smartphone sensors also have some limitations in taking pictures in such darkness. The high ISO resulted in a bit of graininess or 'color noise' in the raw images. In addition, the sky had a pale greenish tint instead of its usual dark or bluish hue.
The Magic of Adobe Lightroom
A raw astro image is like a diamond that needs to be polished to shine. I did this polishing with the Adobe Lightroom mobile app. My first challenge was to remove those annoying green specks from the images.
I went to the Detail panel in Lightroom and turned up the Color Noise Reduction quite a bit. As if by magic, the specks in the sky disappeared and the image became completely smooth. Then, when I went to the Color panel and dragged the Tint slider towards a light magenta or purple, the greenish tint disappeared and the true, deep, and soothing appearance of the night sky emerged.
Finally, to make the sky a perfect black, I reduced the Blacks and Shadows values to minus (around -30). This makes the sky background a solid black and the stars sparkle like diamonds on black velvet. I also slightly increased and decreased Dehaze and Clarity to make the cloud-like part of the galaxy clearer and clearer.
Last words
The whole process - from standing in the pitch-black silence of the village to editing in Lightroom to seeing this final version of the image - was a strangely beautiful and exciting experience. This 'heaven-on-earth' difference between the raw image and the edited image proves that with the right manual settings and a little post-processing, it is possible to capture the infinite beauty of space with an old flagship phone.
If you like night photography and want to participate in the competition, then quickly join the Night Photography Competition Round 2 under my management. Link: @mshbd/night-photography-competition-round-02
I hope my experience will inspire you too. If you get a chance, you can also look at the dark sky with your smartphone, who knows, maybe you will catch an unknown constellation on your camera. Don't forget to tell us in the comments how you liked this change in the Before & After pictures.
(All posts are written in Bengali and translated into English using Google Translate.)
| Camera Used | Samsung SM-G973F |
|---|---|
| F-Stop | F1.5 & F2.4 |
| ISO speed | ISO |
| Focal length | 26mm |
| Flash | No |
| Editing app | lightroom |
| Photography | (astrophotography) |
| Photographer |  |
| Location | Purulia, Natore, Bangladesh |
