Nightscape with Smartphone Camera

by Wayne Wei on in Home

To take a good and detailed night photo, it is important to understand how a camera works in capturing light. The diagram below shows how aperture (f number), shutter time (seconds) and ISO affect the exposure of image.

In short, aperture is an opening that controls the amount of light that enter the camera sensor and also contributes to bokeh effect. Changing shutter time controls how long the light enters camera sensor. ISO is the amplification of light signal or in the other words the sensitivity of camera sensor. For smartphones, aperture size is fixed, this makes us easy to use manual mode on smartphone. Increasing shutter time makes brighter image but it might blur the image. Increasing ISO makes brighter image but the image might be grainy/noisy. So it is better to keep ISO low and shutter time long (0.5s – 1.0s could be the longest for handheld shot that wouldn’t cause blur image).

Here are the hardware and software requirement to take good night-time photos.

Hardware requirement:

    1. Phone with Manual mode/Pro mode. Recent high end smartphones have manual mode to control shutter time, ISO, focus distance, white balance, and RAW format capability. All these features are essential to capture low light night photography. Examples of the smartphones that have these capabilities includes Samsung flagships (S7, S7 edge, S8, S8+), LG (G4, G5, G6, V10, V20), OnePlus (One, 2, X, 3, 3T), iPhone (3rd party apps required), HTC 10, Huawei (P9, P10), Google Pixel. Amongs all these features, the ability to control shutter time and ISO in RAW format are the most important features to have since they are the key factors in exposure triangle. The aperture size of smartphone is fixed so we won’t be able to change it.
    2. Tripod. During night time, the low light condition makes camera difficult to capture enough light, so usually longer shutter time is required especially for night sky photography. But longer shutter time leads to blur images even with OIS (optical image stabilization). This is why tripod is important to make a steady shot. Cheap tripod with a phone holder is enough as long as the environment is not windy and the ground is solid.

    1. Earphones (Optional, acts as remote shutter). Some smartphones have volume buttons enabled as shutter button, this is really helpful when we shoot on a tripod. Touching the on-screen shutter button might cause a little vibration that makes the image blur, so it is better to plug in earphones and trigger shutter button using the volume buttons on the earphones.
    2. Telephoto add-on lens for smartphone (Optional). This lens is good for taking far-distant object such as moon photography but usually add-on lens are not clear due to the imperfect alignment with camera sensor and lens quality. But for moon photography it is still able to let us create better moon images than without using the telephoto lens.

Software requirement:

  1. PC software
    • Free software
      • DeepSkyStacker – This software is for astrophotography (stars, milky way, galaxies, nebula) by stacking images for noise reduction.
      • RegistaX – Similar to DeepSkyStacker but it applies on planetary images (moon, sun, and planets)
      • StarStaX – To create star trails or series of images for star trails timelapse
      • LRTimelapse (Lightroom is required) – works with Lightroom to create timelapse video
    • Paid software
      • Adobe PhotoShop – Basically everything can be done except video related (noise reduction, superresolution, motion blur, and etc)
      • Adobe Lightroom – Image post-processing tool
  2. Android/iOS software
    • For taking photo
      • Stock camera – if manual mode exists in stock camera, then it is the best option since it should be more optimized.
      • Camera FV-5 (paid) (Android) – Almost complete control on camera settings if the device is compatible with the features.
      • Camera+ (iOS)
      • Manual (iOS)
    • For image editing
      • Adobe Lightroom Mobile (iOS and Android) – The best editing app for me. One reason I prefer Lightroom over Snapseed is I am able to keep lots of images and copy & paste editing settings.
      • Snapseed (iOS and Android) – Another great alternative to Lightroom