Cornwall is an excellent place to begin your star photography journey with even just a smartphone you can take amazing photos with a few setting changes and a bit of patience. The light pollution in Cornwall is also almost non existent making exposure of the stars even better.
I had wanted to learn how to photograph stars for as long as I can remember but everytime I tried to capture the swirling magnificence of our galaxy I was just met with inky blackness with occasional spot of a white star, but that was nothing compared to the wonderful spectacle that I was witnessing. I just wanted to be able to capture it in its full beauty. But how?
The change came when I had a phone that had the camera capabilities that could handle star photography. Once I knew that it did, I researched how to play around with my settings and then I found that I could take amazing photos with this setting. and my most successful photo’s happened when I was in Cornwall, which is my favourite place to be so it’s great that it happened here. The photo next to this is the first one I ever took that came out good.
What I did was I put my phone onto pro mode, allowing me to have greater control over the camera settings. I then changed the ISO setting to the highest it could go and set the shutter speed to around 18 seconds to 30 seconds, which enabled the photograph to capture all of the stars with exceptional clarity and detail. This approach elevated the quality of the night sky image, unveiling a breathtaking celestial extraviganza that would have otherwise been obscured by shorter exposure times.
This year I got into adjusting the lighting levels on the images this is how I get the images so dark with great clarity. And this can omly improve so I am excited to learn more about this topic and I will be posting more tips on star photography as I find out about it. – Emma x
We usually post our star photography on our instagram and facebook pages, we have also done a TikTok featuring the images that we have taken so be sure to check that out at @chyanholidays on all social media. We hope that you have found this blog useful and please consider signing up for our news letter.
