{"id":16952,"date":"2014-04-27T23:37:44","date_gmt":"2014-04-27T23:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/picsart.com\/blog\/post\/photographing-the-stars-with-phil-hart"},"modified":"2020-08-20T01:28:27","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T08:28:27","slug":"photographing-the-stars-with-phil-hart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/picsart.com\/blog\/photographing-the-stars-with-phil-hart\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographing the Stars with Phil Hart: Read our Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Phil Hart <\/a>is an Australian photographer who specializes in taking marvelous shots of the night sky. He has written a book titled Shooting Stars<\/a>, on how to photograph the moon and the stars with nothing but your DSLR camera, and produced an impressive body of awe-inspiring photos of the night sky and the celestial bodies that fill it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read our interview with Phil and learn about how he creates these spectacular images.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How did you get started shooting photos of the stars?<\/span><\/h2>\n

When I was a teenager, my mum brought home some film SLRs from the school where she worked. Since I was developing an interest in astronomy at the time, I started using and experimenting with the cameras at night as much as during the day. I remember getting rolls of photos back with a long exposure of the backyard with all the colours visible like daylight even though the photo was taken during the dark of night. I\u2019ve never stopped using cameras at night since.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What equipment do you use to achieve such vivid results?\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

All of my \u2018Night Sky Photography\u2019 is done using Canon digital SLRs and a growing collection of lenses, several wide angle and some nice telephoto options as well. I have also done quite a bit of \u2018Deep Sky Astrophotography\u2019 using telescopes, equatorial tracking mounts and scientific CCD cameras.<\/p>\n

What are the conditions necessary to see the stars, as in where do you go to shoot these fantastic shots?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Unless you\u2019re shooting the moon, the first condition is to try and get away from the lights of the big cities and the second is to shoot on a night with clear skies. I regularly shoot from locations all around coastal and central Victoria (Australia) but also took a lot of photos of the night sky while living in Scotland and during my nine week aurora adventures in the Yukon in Canada. <\/span><\/p>\n

What special techniques do you use to shoot the night sky to get such vivid and clear pictures of events and objects that are so far away in outer space?<\/span><\/h2>\n

While people don\u2019t always believe it, some of my night sky images taken with nothing more than a DSLR on a tripod and a wide angle lens look pretty good right on the back of the camera. They don\u2019t even need a lot of processing. It\u2019s just about getting the long exposures right with today\u2019s very impressive digital cameras and using a wide aperture. I\u2019ve even written a whole book called \u2018Shooting Stars\u2019, about how to do this kind of photography. Astrophotography through a telescope is considerably more complicated, with long exposures on tracking mounts and stacking of many exposures to build up the required total exposure time of very faint targets. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Is there a particular celestial body, object or phenomena in outer space, that you are most fascinated by?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Aurora (the Northern or Southern Lights) is spellbinding no matter how many times you\u2019ve seen it. I spent nine weeks on an adventure in Canada\u2019s Yukon Territory chasing the Northern Lights and producing timelapse videos<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is there a particular event that you would love to capture again?\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

A total solar eclipse is such a short event (just a couple of minutes) that you can never capture all the photos you would like in such a short period of time. It would be great to have another crack at one soon but I think I\u2019ll be sticking closer to home for a while now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Is there any upcoming astronomical event that you are gearing up to photograph?\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

We have a partial solar eclipse and two lunar eclipses in Australia this year,<\/p>\n

so I will certainly be hoping for good weather to photograph those. And I\u2019ll be keeping an eye out for a couple of comets which might get bright enough to photograph if we\u2019re lucky, but they are always fickle and hard to predict.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Has photographing the night sky changed the way you look at the world?\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

The first thing you notice is all the light pollution we\u2019re throwing up into the night sky, which leads you to think more about the other ways we\u2019re hurting this fragile little planet that we live on. The bright blue sky during the day may look vast and beyond our influence but in fact it\u2019s a tenuously thin layer of atmosphere that sustains us all. I hope we\u2019ll learn to look after it!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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