Photographing Stars?
I'm currently in Helen, GA for a weekend getaway. Tonight the stars were so pretty and I desperately wanted to capture the beauty. So I unpacked my tripod and set up my Nikon D3300 to take a few shots of the night sky. I was nowhere around the city, and there were no bright lights messing with the view--not even the moon. I tried to manually focus with my 35mm lens and got nothing. The live view screen remained black. I tried again and action to no avail. No matter what I did, all that appeared was a black screen, and it was the same when I did a test shot. And yes, the lens cap was off. I have tried googling for some info on this, but all that really comes up is to make sure your focus ring is at infinity and you are in manual focus and no other light source is present. I did all of this and had no luck. None. Could someone with much more experience than this poor soul who loves to capture the world as she sees it please help said poor soul out? Is there something I'm just missing?
If you want stationary stars ie not trails, then you need to have the ISO up high, the aperture at it's widest and the shutter speed at around 25secs (not more).
If you are using the kit lens, you'll need to be at 18mm focal length in order to get the widest aperture that that lens is capable of (f3.5).
Ideally for stars you need a faster lens - f2.8 or faster.
Shoot in manual exposure mode and for goodness sake, don't use live view - your camera has a viewfinder - use it.
You need a remote shutter release and practice shots with long exposures up to 20 seconds. With the aperture wide open (F/4 or F/3.5), and a wide field of view (18mm), camera and lens on manual(turning off autofocus and VR) you need to do exposures 20 seconds. Any more time than that, the stars may become dashes (star trails) instead of points of light. Another thing is in the tiny camera monitor I can miss star pictures that can be seen on a print or large screen, just wanted to mention that.
Do you know how to shoot using manual exposure? If not, you need to read up on this subject.
As a starting point, set your ISO to 1000, aperture to f/3.5, shutter speed 15 seconds, white balance set to daylight. You can opt to use a wider aperture like f/2.8. F/2.8 is sharp on the Nikon 35mm lens.
Adjust your settings to give the sort of exposure you want. Best not to use shutter speeds exceeding 15 seconds, especially with a 35mm lens (too long) as you'll start seeing star trails.
If you want to take longer exposures, you need to have a tracker. I piggyback my camera on a telescope with a tracker when shooting using a long lens.
Focus is a big issue! Auto focus won't work and modern lenses don't have an infinity focus stop that is set to infinity (it's slightly past infinity). Trying to focus using the viewfinder is almost hopeless. Live view may be usable if you open your aperture to f/1.8 and set the live view magnification at maximum.
The way I focus is to know my lens. During daytime, I autofocus on something very far away (quarter of a mile will do). This is your infinity focus point. Then I turn the focus ring until it stops at what one would think would be infinity. Count the number of knurls on your focus ring between the stop (you'll feel the clutch mechanism grab when you hit the stop) and the actual infinity focus. Now you can go out in the dark, turn your focus ring towards infinity focus until you hit the stop. Then back off the number of knurls in the focus ring so it will be set properly. On a couple of my lenses, including the 35mm f/1.8, it's 3 knurl bumps.
Lastly, you need to shoot in raw. You'll need to do post processing to bring out the dimmer features and get your black level set properly to remove sky glow. You need to work with 16-bit per color images. Photoshop or The GIMP (GIMP is free and full featured) are good tools for post processing. The software that came with your camera can convert your raw images to 16-bit TIFF images.