Star trails

lucky_13

lucky_13

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Name
Billy
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Hi I want to shoot some star trails using my 18-55 kit lens which doesn't have a focusing window and I'm finding it difficult to focus on the stars or focus to infinity, any ideas on how I can do this?
 
I usually just focus on something suitably far away like a street light/tree etc then turn off the AF. I usually find this works well so long as I don't knock the focus ring.
 
Cheers for the advice. The problem I have is that I shoot in a field near my house which is surrounded by woodland in all directions and it very dark all around the field to find a subject to focus on, guess I'll just have to focus before I get to the field or maybe set a torch at the other end of the field just for focusing purposes.
 
If you switch on Live View, then zoom in, you can usually make out the stars on the LCD display. Then you can just use manual focus to get the stars looking sharp.
 

Startrails1 copy by silure130, on Flickr

hi
I am still learning, but what I did with my 18-55mm lens was to set the iso to 3200 and take a 2 min shot. This gave me an image on the lcd with which I could see if I liked the shot and that the stars were in focus. I did the above image at the weekend, 100 shots of 30secs. This was in my back garden, I'm aiming to go out further and get some nice foreground in.:thumbs:
 
If you get a strong enough laser you can bounce it off something over a few hundred yards away, this will effectively set your focus to infinity.
 
If you're talking about foreground focus? then use a torch as suggested.... If you mean the stars? then focus really is not that critical anyway, so long as you get somewhere near.... Just use a distant'ish street light or bedroom window :D
 
If you search for laser and 5d or 7d on youtube you can see what I mean. While these are display lasers I wouldn't think they can be that strong as they shine on the crowd.
 
If you really are stupid enough to point a laser at your sensor from several yards away for several seconds then a warning is justified (and quite frankly you deserve everything you get).
If, on the other hand, you apply a modicom of common sense (or even possess one brain cell) you will do like I said and
bounce it off something over a few hundred yards away
Click to expand...
and your sensor will be fine as it's only sensing the illuminated part of the tree or whatever, and is not being bombarded with a focused stream of highly amplified photons as most of it scatters randomly.
 
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