Astrophotography on a Phone // Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra By Demas Rusli

So I've got the camera shooting here. It's a 30. Second exposure Julian is standing right there standing in that epic rice close your legs a little three two one go hi, guys, hey guys, hey guys, welcome back to another YouTube video. Today, I'm going to be doing sort of a tutorial vlog, something that I wanted to do for a long time now, um macrophotography on a phone which is specifically this phone that I'm using currently, which is the Samsung Galaxy note 20, ultra long name, yeah, I'm here with Ben, and we're picking up Julian at the moment, and we're picking up pap, and we're going to be going to the blue mountains. A place called Lincoln rocks. Uh we've never been there before.

So we're going to check it out, see how we go. Um yeah come along on this journey. I hope everyone's doing well, um but yeah. I hope you enjoyed this vlog. What's up what's up? What's up? What's happening? Oh man, the weather's, not looking good, hey, uh, it's supposed to be clear tonight, but on our drive there, it's raining um, but the weather app still says it's going to be clear tonight, so it's still forging ahead and see how we go we'll see how we go.

Traffic is not great and it's raining. How long have we been driving for now an hour more? No, what is at five o'clock already two hours, four minutes to go all right, so we've just made it to Lincoln rock. Luckily the rain stopped, but there are still some pretty big puddles here. Um pretty excited to see the view. I think sunset's, looking like it's going to be pretty cool but yeah we're going to explain what you need to plan for when you're looking to do some macrophotography, so I'll put the camera down, and we'll talk about that real soon check out this view, though, all right.

So let's talk about what we needed to plan for to get this Castro shot. So the first thing you want to do is to check the weather see if the skies are going to be clear or not. So that's probably the first step and then the next thing you want to check is the moon cycle. So you want it to be new moon or close to new moon so that it's not bright in the sky. So you can see as many stars as possible so right now new moon's coming up in maybe three or four days.

So that's why we decided to go now Milky Way. Season is around June, so we've kind of passed that a little, but we should still be able to get some cool skies and Milky Way is facing west. So you want to find a location, that's facing west, obviously to try to get the Milky Way. But even if you don't get the milk away, you'll still get some cool stars for macrophotography. You want to get yourself a tripod and a camera that can do manual, shooting um and yeah.

We'll talk about the shooting in the settings later and how to set it up, but essentially two things you want to look for is cloudless skies and also the moon cycle should be quite close to new moon but yeah. This is a pretty cool spot. So I'm looking forward to shooting this tonight. Can you guys see those two cars down there? Oh, that's it! That's it! How do you get up there? Oh yeah, that's pretty sick, so um. One reason why we're coming here is because Samsung Australia have asked me to create two Instagram posts, and I wanted to share the whole behind scenes process.

This vlog is not sponsored by them or anything. I just wanted to show the whole creation of what you can do on a mobile phone. I guess these days but yeah. Hopefully I can get at least two shots today for the two photos that I need to post for Samsung and also get some cool macrophotography as well, which is the main aim of this vlog. But yeah this place is really cool.

You guys can see. The clouds are filling up the sky right now, and so we don't know if it's going to clear up, but we might just grab something quick to eat and then come back to see what it's like we'll see how we go. So we made it back to Lincoln rock again to try to get some Castro. The clouds cleared up, which is really amazing. So, yes, you probably can't see it because it's going to be really dark, but I will take some shots and show you guys uh the settings I use and how to go about it on a phone as well.

So, let's go so because it was insanely dark, and we had to turn off the light to take the photos, I'm going to explain the whole shooting process through screen recordings and voice-overs. The first step is to set up your phone or camera on a sturdy tripod, so it doesn't move at all. Then turn on your camera, app on your phone on Samsung phones, there's a pro mode, that's built in that allows you to control the camera settings manually as well as shooting in raw file format. You definitely want to turn on the ability to shoot raw in the settings, as this will give you more data and flexibility when editing the photos later on alright, so now, you're in pro mode, you can start adjusting your settings as the aperture on this phone is locked at f 1.8, which is quite big already all the shots I'm going to be taking will be at this aperture for macrophotography. You want your aperture to be as wide open as possible to allow as much light into the lens as possible for the ISO.

Furthermore, you want to go as low as you can, but not too low to the point where it's too dark, and you can't see anything so in this case I'm going to try ISO 400 to begin with, because I'm shooting this on a phone with a small sensor. I don't want to push it any higher than this, as the shots will start to get quite grainy on cameras with bigger sensors, though you can probably try going ISO 800 or even ISO 1600. We will need to compensate for the darkness by increasing the shutter speed. So, let's try 30 seconds to begin with, which is the maximum on this phone. The last thing you want to do is to shoot with manual focus on this phone.

There's focus peaking, meaning that what's in focus would be colored green. So what I did was I found a super bright star zoomed in on it as much as I could and then adjusted the focus slider until you get the star as sharp as possible notice that the infinity focus is not right at the end of the slider. So you want to check this as well with your phone or your lens to make sure you got the focus right, oh, and you want to turn on your two-second timer as well, so your camera doesn't shake when you press the shutter button for macrophotography, you want to experiment quite a bit until you get the settings right and do some test shots depending on what gear you're using alright. So now we've got our settings. Let's take some shots and pick our compositions.

The first shot I wanted to get was just a clean image of the sky with no subject in the foreground. The Milky Way was visible, which was awesome, but it was positioned quite flat along the horizon line, so I angled my camera diagonally to get the Milky Way on an angle in the final image. These were some of the raw images I shot, trying out different compositions. The next shot I wanted to get was one with a small subject in the foreground, so I asked Julian to stand in and model for me. The settings I used were exactly the same as before, but we needed to use a light to give more detail to the subject and foreground.

First, we tried using my LED light stick, but it was just too bright. I only turned on the light for one second during that 30 second exposure as well. So next we wanted to try with a smaller source of light, so we tried a phone torch. Pat helped me shine a phone torch on Julian's back, and we experimented with the amount of time and where the light was shining. We first tried about one to two seconds on just his back.

Then we tried about three to four seconds on Jesse's back, and then we finally tried three to four seconds on his back and the ground as well. This was probably my favorite as we got some detail on his back and also on the rock. Not only does shine the torch add more detail to the subject's clothes and add some textures to the ground, but it also helps freeze the subject too meaning he doesn't need to stand still for the full 30 seconds. The last thing I wanted to try was an Castro time-lapse. For this I had to buy and download an app called interferometer for 2.79. This app stimulates a button press at a desired interval, meaning that you can use it to shoot timeless with manual settings or pro mode on your phone.

So I set it up to shoot every 35 seconds and just let it run all the boys were shooting time lapses, so we just chilled out enjoyed each other's company and the view for about an hour. In total, I got about 105 shots which equated to about 4 seconds of footage. Overall, I was super impressed that I could shoot the galaxy on my galaxy device pretty cleanly, and it just goes to show how far mobile phone camera technology has come. Alright, so to edit the shots, I imported the raw files into adobe, Lightroom classic and just played around with each slider. Until I was happy with the tones and colors in general, though I increased the exposure, contrast highlight shadows and whites and decrease the blacks a bit.

I also push the DK slider all the way to try to remove any atmospheric caves for the colors. I usually try to make the colors more blue, and you can check out my previous video on how I color grade my night photos for more detail. Next, I played around with the 4x5 crop, and then I added some graduated and radial filters to emphasize and color correct, selected parts of the image. Next I opened the edit up in photoshop to clean up the image a bit. I removed the tripod legs in front of Julian the backpack on the ground and also pat holding the light on the left, and that's it check out this before and afters.

For the time-lapse, I color graded one of the raw files. First then copied the same grade to all the other images in the sequence. I then exported all 105 images out to a specific folder and also made sure the naming is numbered correctly as well in the right order once exported. I imported them into Adobe Premiere pro to create a video file. Next, I play with the composition, and then I saved off one frame and then open that frame up in photoshop.

Here I can add a subject to the foreground and also separate out the ground too, on its own layer. Once that's done, I save this off as a PNG and then bring it back to Adobe Premiere to create a cinema graph, I'm going to be making a more detailed video on how to make a cinema graph soon so stay tuned for that. So here's the final time-lapse edit, I'm still blown away that this was all shot on a phone. What do you guys think all right guys, so that was the end of the trip hope you found this tutorial aerophone tutorial, shooting video, useful um! You guys can try it out yourself if you like this video make sure you give it a like if you have any questions or have any suggestions for future videos leave them in the comments below and if you want to see more coming soon hit that subscribe button. As always thanks so much for watching and remember to always push your creativity to the next level.

Bye say bye to the vlog bye, vlog, bye, Julian dialogue,.

Source : Demas Rusli