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Do you have some tips for focusing in the dark? I find it very difficult to be able to tell if I’ve focused properly before taking the picture. For example taking pictures of stars and star trails the screen is black and I can’t tell if it’s focused. Some times it focuses and other times it doesn’t. I do use a tripod so it’s not a camera shake problem.
What I do is try to point the camera at a bright star. Then I zoom in 10x in Live view and focus till I find it. Obviously, sometimes you have to move the camera around to find the star. It always seems to take a few minutes, but it always works for me.
I rarely add something too close into the foreground because it would be ruined when I stack the photos.
I distinctly remember the first shot I tried to take in the dark….I’ll see if I can’t bring it up on the webinar tomorrow. It totally wasn’t sharp, like you mentioned, and I too was using a tripod. So after that I looked into how to focus in the dark and haven’t had a problem since! Will share some tips about this tomorrow: https://www.lenspiration.com/photography-qa-with-lenspiration-sep-16/
Here’s the snippet, @blessingscaptured, from the webinar!
https://www.lenspiration.com/video/focus-dark/Guess what, I was taking pictures of stars the other day and it was soooo dark that couldn’t get my AF to work! There was no moon and there was no distant lights and there was no light-ish horizon …. you gotta remember I live in West Virginia. 🙂 I then proceeded to follow my advice and turned on LiveView to zoom in and manually focus on the stars, but …. LiveView was completely black! I suppose I should have tried sky-rocketting my ISO to see if I could have made LiveView work, but I just ended up manually setting the focus ring to the infinity mark. I have yet to see if that method of focus actually worked, but I think it did.
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