Astrophotography is a creative hobby and a magnificent display of art. Even when capturing the phenomenal night skies sounds excellent, it’s not something everyone can do. Taking photos of the celestial wonders requires one to have the highest quality equipment and expertise. Taking about suitable equipment, Nikon’s famous D3300 digital camera is quite impressive for astrophotographers. Many people have successfully captured award-winning night skies’ and Milky Way’s shots using the Nikon D3300 smartly.
This digital camera comes with various efficient features that allow you to take more precise and more comprehensive shots. The Nikon D3300 is often referred to as the most advanced entry-level digital camera by its makers. It has a collapsible 18 – 55mm VR II lens having 3.5 – 5.6 focal capacity. The user-friendliness of this camera is worth the appreciation among its other qualities. You can focus on what matters the most in a frame using D3300’s powerful 24MP APS-C sensor and can view your shots clearly on its 3 inches LCD screen.
This Nikon camera features the fast Expeed 4 processor that makes sure that you capture every shot exactly when you want to. With this camera, you can also record high-quality videos using its 1080/60p HD video recorder. Anyone can easily capture perfect photos only if they use this camera’s exceptional features accurately.
Here are some tips that you can follow to make sure that you’re using your Nikon D3300 in the perfect possible way.
Be Patient
Patience is a significant key to success when you’re learning a new skill. This need to practice patience becomes even more important when the skill being learned is as tricky and complicated as astrophotography. Capturing the night sky perfectly requires one to tend to a number of things. Chances are that your starting attempts at astrophotography would badly fail. You should expect some blunders at the beginning, even if you’re a skilled photographer otherwise.
Don’t lose heart just because you ended up spending your entire night with not even a single good picture. We want you to know that failing repeatedly but keeping on with patience is the only way you can master this art. Just one perfect shot of a night sky requires the photographer to spend hours capturing and editing it. All of this means that you should have a lot of patience if you really want to get somewhere.
The importance of good equipment for a new photographer trying to stay patient during all this can’t be ignored. Many photographers give up on astrophotography because they can’t even learn the proper use of their cameras. However, this shouldn’t be the case with anyone using Nikon D3300 for night photography. It’s a user-friendly camera that even beginners can easily set up according to their needs. Thus, anyone using Nikon D3300 doesn’t need to spend a lot of time understanding its working. This would make it possible for them to focus more on learning new skills. A user-friendly camera also keeps one motivated enough not to lose hope and can help them stay patient.
Know Bulb Mode Well
Capturing those mighty elements of the galaxy means you will have to learn to use your camera in the bulb mode. In this mode, the shutter is held open for as long as needed so that you can get the desired shot quickly. However, having the shutter open using a wireless remote control instead of your fingers is a better option for night sky photographers. In most of the cameras, bulb mode is activated by keeping the finger pressed on the shutter button. Once you develop a passion for astrophotography and learn it well, you’ll understand the real importance of mastering the bulb mode of every camera you own. There’d be days when you use your camera in the bulb mode throughout the night just to get a single good shot.
The Bulb mode of your Nikon D3300 is not too complex to understand. You can either set it up manually or can use any remote control compatible with your D33000 to fix its bulb mode. We suggest you also invest some of your time in learning the interval shot function of your Nikon digital camera. Using it, you can set your camera in a manner that releases the shutter every now and then on its own. This way, the resulting image will have perfect exposure and won’t look too sharp.
Mastering this and other useful aspects of using bulb mode on your Nikon D3300 can help you capture flawless pictures of starry skies every time. Initially, you may find mastering this mode quite tricky. However, you mustn’t give up on your efforts it’s the key to becoming a great nighttime photographer in the long run.
Practice A Lot
No matter how user-friendly a camera is, you cannot expect yourself to start taking the most perfect shots right after you get your hands on it. For someone who is aiming to master astrophotography (literally, every type of photography), practice, and a lot of it are mandatory. There are a lot of expert photographers out there who left capturing the night skies for a few months because of their busy routines. As a result of this break, those folks were back to square one when they picked the camera again.
You might have to spend a month or more of sleepless nights outdoors, trying to capture a good night sky photo before you finally get a share-worthy shot captured. Some people think that capturing the sky in all its glory is usually a matter of luck. You just step out with your camera and are lucky enough to have the sky fully embellished for you to shoot. However, this is nothing but a myth. Even if you’ve been the luckiest guy in the family, your hard work is the only thing that can make you successful astrophotography.
The only luck you can have when practicing for that perfect night time shot is to have a practice-friendly camera like the Nikon D3300 with you. A practice-friendly camera comes with a range of features suitable for everyone, from beginners to experts, is easy to use, and supports a good battery life. The Nikon D3300 has almost all these features to make your practice sessions fun enough for you not to give up.
Travel To The Right Place
Unless it is your lucky day, you cannot find the night sky clear enough to take a perfect shot from your building’s roof. Unfortunately, the increasing pollution in our big cities has wholly blocked the clear sky’s view. You can’t capture all those nebulae and stars even with the most advanced equipment and even after you climb at the city’s highest building. This is what makes most of the night sky photographers travel up hills and to the countryside in their mission to capture a good shot.
As someone trying to pursue astrophotography professionally, you will have to travel a lot. It is usually in the most isolated parts of the country that the skies are clear and pollution in low. Finding such places is and then traveling there is the first step to learning and mastering astrophotography. Such wide and pollution-free spots that allow you to best use your Nikon D3300’s exceptional features.
This camera comes with great focus and a powerful auto exposure mode that process the scene being captured for a clearer show. Using these features of Nikon D3300, you can easily decide if your shooting location is accurate or not.
Use Low ISOs
ISOs determine the brightness level of your shots. The higher you set your camera’s ISO on, the brighter would be the picture. When shooting the night sky, using lower ISOs is the key to getting a smooth and clean shot. An ISO set below 800 is usually ideal for a shot captured at night because it removes as the noise. However, it can go a little above or considerably below 800 depending upon the light and other such conditions of the night’s sky the time you are shooting it at.
Another important factor is to cater to the white balance of your camera. A moderate white balance on Nikon D3300 helps keep the white in your shoots white enough to make the dark night sky more elaborate. This combination of balanced whites and low ISOs makes your night time photos look perfect and more than magnificent.
The Nikon D3300 users can easily set up their aperture, shutter speed, and focus alongside keeping the ISOs low. This camera comes equipped with all the necessary features, and their user-friendly set up makes it even easier to use them in the best possible way. Thanks to Nikon’s efficient auto-focus, the final images automatically come relatively free of noise and are moderately sharp.
Conclusion
An advanced camera and expensive lenses never guarantee a perfect night time shot. However, constant practice and tested tricks like these can help you reach exceptional photography standards quite easily with your Nikon D3300.
