Q&A: How Do I Shoot Stars?
Recently, I was camping. During a brilliantly starry night, I was trying to capture the sky with my Olympus Camedia C-740. Unfortunately, all the photos just turned out black with no stars. I tried several settings, including manual mode. How can I capture stars with my digital camera?
--Tom Repko, Richmond, Virginia
Well, Tom, you just helped debunk one of those "we never landed on the moon" myths. Some skeptics claim that the moon landings were shot in a sound stage because you can't see any stars in the photos. Well, it turns out that a camera's sensitivity is so low that it takes quite a long exposure setting to get stars to register in a picture.
With a film camera, you would need to leave the shutter wide open for several minutes with very fast film to get stars in your sky. That requirement disqualifies almost all digital cameras, since an exposure that long generates so much digital noise that the stars are overwhelmed by random pixels of light.
Sorry, Tom; this is one subject that digital cameras just can't shoot.
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