Shoot for the stars

- Good evening, everybody, I'm Sean Duggan. Welcome to Mobile Photography Weekly After Dark, in which we're going to explore a genre of photography that is not normally associated with mobile camera phones, and that is photography of the night sky and taking pictures of the stars, which is very difficult to do with most cameras and most apps, sometimes impossible to do. I'm going to be using a Huawei P10. That's pronounced H-U-A-W-E-I, pronounced Huawei, and this is a camera that is very good at night photography.

So, let me just swipe over here to show you the modes, so you can see what mode I'm shooting in. Lots of different creative modes that you can use here. I'm in the Night shot mode. There's also a Light painting mode for photographing light trails, such as moving cars, things like that where the light is being painted through the shot as it moves through the shot. But we're in Night shot, and normally when you're in the Night shot mode, it's on automatic for the ISO and the shutter speed. And if there's a little bit more light in the sky, like if it's a little bit earlier in the evening than it is right now, when there's still a little bit of that nice, blue color in the sky, but it is definitely evening time, the Auto mode works really good.

But it's a little bit too dark for that here, so I've gone into a Manual mode, I've set my ISO at 400, and I've set my shutter speed, or my exposure time, how long the exposure is, at 16 seconds. And I arrived at that just through some trial and error testing, and night photography always involves some trial and error testing. So, what we're going to do is, I'm going to take a shot, we're going to lower down the lights, but I'm going to take a shot, and as I take the shot, you're going to see it build up here on the screen in real time.

But in order to provide some separation between the trees here in the foreground and the night sky in the background, I'm going to do some light painting with the flashlight on my iPhone here. And by light painting, I mean that I'm essentially treating the light from the flashlight here as a brush, that I'm going to brush light on the foreground subjects here just to light them up a little bit and provide some separation, and also a little bit of visual interest, 'cause we will see some nice blurring in the leaves of the tree 'cause there's a nice little breeze tonight.

Alright, so, I think we're ready to go. Let's bring down our video production lights, so that we can photograph in natural darkness here. I'm going to just tap here up in the sky just to see if I can get it to focus there, alright? I'm going to start this, here we go. I'll turn my flashlight on, and I'm going to paint. One, two, three, four, five, that's probably all I need.

Turn that off, and you can see it building up there nicely. I just love it, just so magical to see that, especially from a camera phone. Alright, so it's done now. Alright, let's check it out and see how we did. And tap on this little thumb nail of the picture here, which is the last picture that I shot. And I really love the way that the palm frond is blurred there. I think that I nailed the exposure with the light painting with the flashlight.

If I zoom up close, you can see that I have this nice, tack sharpness there in the stars. That's actually part of the Big Dipper there. We can't see all of it because parts of it are behind a tree in the far background. But, I mean, overall, that's pretty cool. And if you look at this up close, there is an amazing lack of noise in this shot. And that is particularly surprising for camera phones 'cause they have such small image sensors that are typically prone to noise.

So, it's pretty cool that we can do this with camera phones now, certain camera phones and certain apps, of course. If you want to try this out with an iPhone, try out the NightCap Pro app. It is also very good for night photography of the stars, it has lots of cool modes. Not quite as impressive as the Huawei phone, but still very impressive. Now, if you're wondering about this cord here, a lot of times, with night photography, since it's longer exposures, and the camera's having to process and averages different exposures together, sometimes that tends to drain the battery.

Also, sometimes cooler temperatures tend to drain the battery. So, I just have this plugged into an external power pack just to give it a little extra power boost. So, if you're interested in extending your mobile photography into the nocturnal realm, you might consider, if that's something you want to do a lot of, you might consider taking a look at the Huawei Android phone, the P10 or the P20, or you can use that NightCap Pro app on the iPhone. But definitely really cool developments to expand the horizons of our mobile photography.