Went out on a rare clear night to a wetlands near me to take some photos of the stars. As it was so dark, and the stars are so small, I had to rely on the focus peaking function of my camera to tell if the stars were in focus or not.
I’ve got home and started to process the photos, and I’ve found out that despite the camera telling me that they were in focus, they clearly weren’t.
Hey ho, what’s a wasted few hours in the freezing cold between friends…
That’s what I thought I had done. This camera, the Sony a6000, has a focus peaking mode, where it puts a coloured overlay on top of the object that’s in focus. In a situation like mine, where it’s difficult to tell with the eye, it tells you what the camera sees as in focus.
Last night it put the overlay on the stars, telling me that they were in focus. I’ve used it for astrophotography in the past, so I thought that it was correct. I don’t know why it didn’t work last night.
My camera is the a6400, and it has an option to manually set the focus, I believe that it’s the PRO mode, where you can customise the exposure time with a number and the focus with the lens thingy.
You maybe did not set things correctly, but if that’s the camera you have try tweaking the options so that you can set things like focus and exposure time manually. I mean, it’s the sky, you don’t need fast or dynamic focus or anything like that, all you need is a tripod and to point the camera up.
For sky photos I would set the focus as far as it lets you. Sadly, you will never be able to correctly focus stars because their focal point is just way too far, so manually setting is a far as the camera lets you should suffice.
Here’s a guide to take sky photos with your camera model, but should work with any decent one: https://realisticwanderlust.com/2018/10/16/photographing-the-milky-way/
The a6000 is the same. I manually set the focus, and the focus display on the screen told me that it was set correctly when it wasn’t.
I’ve been taking similar photos for about ten years now, and this is the first time this has happened. While I was in a new area, I was less than half a mile from home, so there were no major changes to my usual setup.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. People take in focus photos of the stars around the world every day. I’ve taken hundreds over the years. Lots of lenses need to be focused all the way out, then dialled back very slightly, and the a6000 kit lens needs to be dialled back further than most. They can take pin sharp photos of the stars though.
What’s happened in my case is that because I have trouble seeing the stars on a screen, I used the focus guide, like I have lots of times before. I set the focus to what the guide said was correct, because it usually works for me, but for some reason this time, the guide was wrong.