Night photography for the beginner. Actually this is a two blog title.
Night photography can be simply landscape with the long exposures and impacted created by that, can be light trails of moving automobiles, or downtown city scenes lit by the various surrounding lights. All are effective and each has their own little nuances of how to get optimal results.
The other is an area onto its own, and is astrophotography. Even astrophotography has many flavours. Some of the moon, which is actually fairly bright as a subject generally (exceptions depending on phase of moon or if an eclipse being captured). The other aspect is deep space, which can get into electronic trackers which follow the rotation of the earth, keeping camera in one spot relative to space for long periods of time needed for long exposures as anything over around 25-30 seconds will introduce star trails. Of course star trails is yet another type of astrophotography again! Almost all astrophotography will dip into photo stacking to get the detail one wants.
Where do I begin?
Lets look at simple longer exposure stationary camera photographs. Perhaps the Milky Way.
First you are going to need to find a dark area in the sky and there are some good tools for that. Some apps (look for LPM or Light Pollution Map) as a good one and there is an online interactive map here: https://www.lightpollutionmap.info .
Next you will need a tripod! This is not something you should be resting the camera on the ground, your lap or any other less stable platform than a true, sturdy tripod.
Next you need to find the Milky Way – and an app called Photo Pills is likely as good as any! https://www.photopills.com/ .
Next a good wide angle lens, preferably 20mm or less (even more important to be less if a crop camera body). Try to find one without a lot of barrel distortion – at least at the 18-20mm range if possible. The better the image and the lower the barrel distortion the better.
Now there are several ways to do this. My preference when not using a tracker is to simply shoot a lot of photos of 20-30 second exposure time (short enough to not get star trails). Do not set ISO too high or you will get noise, but the higher the better of course (you need to play with this area). My camera I can go to ISO 3200 or even 6400 fairly easily. Aperture as wide as the lens will go. If you are stacking images you will not want foreground or land images as part of the photo (unless you do a single shot).
If you do several and wish to stack try using Deep Star Tracker – although there are a few out there you can get for free. These align the starts – and stack them giving awesome results.
Of course you also need a camera. What model. Well use what you have. Of course the ones which are better in low light and which have invariant sensors are ideal but use what you have.
Place on tripod, open up lens to perhaps 20mm or so (wider on crop sensor camera). Depending on your camera and features, set up for photograph. Focus manually – use live view for focus and get the stars as small and perfect a dot as you can (enlarge or zoom in on live view screen helps). You can do a mirror up or what ever you have to try and eliminate any shake from any source. Some cameras will even shoot several photos in sequence with a short break between each shot. What your camera does is good enough.
Enjoy, have fun and learn. If it does not work well the first time do not despair! None of us learned it all in one session.