Night photography with a mobile phone?
One question that often comes up is if you can do night photography, and especially astro and northern lights photography, with a mobile phone camera.
The short answer is YES you can. And here is the proof. All pictures are taken with my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. Click to view full size.
How do you do it?
I hate to be the one that breaks it to you, but you can’t just go out and point and shoot the sky. There are some major caveats and limitations you need to be aware of to get the most out of your camera. I will walk you through what you need to know about using a mobile phone for astro and aurora photography. Most of this will apply to low light photography in general regardless of what type of scenery you are shooting.
To unlock the mobile phone cameras full potential in dark environment you need to do these things:
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- Save the file as a RAW file. Very important!
- Shoot in pro mode and manually adjust ALL settings and use the longest possible exposure (usually 30 seconds). RAW format is usually only available from pro mode.
- Since you have a RAW file you must also post process it yourself and export it to a usable picture format.
- Use the MAIN camera as it has the best sensor.
- Do NOT shoot handheld. The camera must be perfectly still for the entire exposure (30 seconds usually). For that you need to use a tripod (or something else to support the camera).
I’m sorry to say this, but if you skip any part of the above, you will only use a fraction of what your camera is capable of. Unfortunately there is no way around this…
If you’re fine with this, then you can stop reading and go out and shoot night photography. You now know what you need to know. But if you doubt the validity of my arguments, want to know more or see why these steps are necessary, then read on. But first, here are some examples where you clearly can see the difference yourself:
Night mode, 30 seconds, on a tripod, processed by camera and saved as jpeg.
Pro mode, 30 seconds, on a tripod, processed by camera and saved as jpeg.
Pro mode, 30 seconds, on a tripod, saved as RAW and manually processed before export to jpeg.
Night mode, 30 seconds, on a tripod, processed by camera and saved as jpeg.
Pro mode, 30 seconds, on a tripod, processed by camera and saved as jpeg.
Pro mode, 30 seconds, on a tripod, saved as RAW and manually processed before export to jpeg.
Why RAW format and not jpeg?
All jpeg files are translated from the original RAW file before they are saved. There is only two ways this can happen. Either you do it yourself or some software must do it automatically for you. The RAW file can not be displayed on the screen without processing. It’s much like writing text on a keyboard. You can’t plug your keyboard directly into your screen and write text. Something must translate the codes generated by the keyboard into text that can be displayed on the screen or printed. The color, font, size, row distance, letter spacing and so on has to be assigned by either you manually or automatically by the software.
As you can clearly see in the above pictures, all of the automatic modes in the camera, even the night mode, is vastly inferior in quality to the one saved as a RAW file and processed manually by me. And in these example pictures there is some moonlight present, if there had been no moonlight at all, the difference between RAW/jpeg would have been even bigger. If you choose to not use RAW files, you will only have picture 1 and 2 to choose from. The camera sensor can deliver the quality of picture 3, but that quality will not be available to you unless you shoot RAW files. There is no way around it, no camera of today can even remotely post process night photography as a human can. Let me explain why…
Why not automatic modes?
A mobile phone camera usually have several different modes that you can use to take pictures. They range from the default behavior when you just open your camera app, point it to the scene you want to shoot and push the exposure button, and then all the way to the other extreme in a professional mode where you have to decide and manually enter every single value for the picture yourself, like white balance, exposure time, ISO and manually focus. You then get the resulting picture saved as a RAW file which you need to post process yourself before you have a developed picture (a .jpg file for instance) that you can use to post on social media or print or whatever you want to use it for. There are usually some in between modes available also, often called night mode or something similar. These modes use some clever techniques behind the scene. There might be a couple of options available, but with limited possibilities to adjust how the picture is exposed. You usually don’t have to do much yourself except holding your phone as still as possible.
Generally speaking, mobile phones are working best when there is good amounts of light available. The difference between a mobile phone camera and a professional camera becomes exponentially more obvious the less light there is available. In really dark night environments with no artificial light, moonlight and very low light pollution, which are preferred when doing astro and aurora photography, even the best mobile phones will struggle to collect enough light to overcome sensor noise. This will generate very noisy pictures even with the longest exposure times available. We will get into that more in a minute.
Mobile phones have, for obvious reasons, limited possibilities to use larger sensors or bigger lenses, so manufacturers extensively have to use something called computational photography. Meaning that they use software and AI to understand what the camera is seeing, how to interpret the scenery, what settings to apply, then using different settings on different sceneries. The camera also uses advanced techniques like stacking, rotating and aligning several pictures, noise reduction and HDR bracketing to name a few. There is generally a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think. So if you are one of those who think mobile phone pictures are “no filter real pictures” then you better think again. You will have a hard time finding pictures more processed than those shot in automatic mode on a mobile phone. The software uses machine learning to understand what you want, if you open your camera, point it towards a sunset and you then adjusts something, like re-focus or adjusting the exposure, the software understands that the choices it made was not satisfactory. When you are happy and push the exposure button the software understands that for this type of scenery this kind of setting is preferrable. Over time it learns to interpret scenes better.
What is the problem?
The problem with night photography is that it is too dark for the software to work it’s magic. The camera have a very hard time seeing the scenery and therefore have a limited understanding of what it is looking at or what settings to apply. It simply can’t make any choices or evolve if it is almost blind. The type of post processing needed also greatly differs in night time photography. No two night pictures can be post processed the same way. That’s why the automatic modes at night generally do not perform even remotely as good as you can do yourself with manual post processing. In daytime when the sensors can be saturated with light, you have to be pretty good at post-processing to outperform the camera algorithm. At night it’s very easy to outperform the camera software by doing the processing yourself. Even if you use pro mode and shoot long exposure RAW footage, the resulting JPEG has to be interpreted almost blindly by the software. The camera itself only see a dark frame basically (or maybe some bright points and some light streaks from aurora, but it’s hard for the software to guess what it is). And it can also see that there is severe noise present. The camera don’t know how to bring out shadow detail and at the same time combat noise, so it’s generally going to darken the entire picture giving you a foreground that is barely visible.
Most cameras also have a very hard time understanding what white balance to apply when most of the scenery is almost completely dark. This fact will often result in a picture with very strange colors. A new moon shining over a snowy landscape together with aurora in the sky can result in a very strange looking blue/greenish landscape that looks horrible. And in a jpeg file these problems are very hard to rectify as they are burnt into the file, much like getting a ready made picture from a polaroid camera. Here is an example of how the system can mess up pictures sometimes.
Other problems arising during nighttime
Focusing:
The fact that you basically only see a black frame on your screen at night also creates other problems. One is how to focus on the stars, which is absolutely necessary for a successful astro or aurora picture.. It is almost impossible to focus out in the field under a dark sky with a mobile phone. If you’re lucky you can maybe see a couple of the brightest stars. But even if you can see them, they are so small on the screen that you have a very hard time seeing any difference when trying to focus. There are some tricks that can be used on some phones though. On many phones there is a possibility to enlarge parts of the screen so those who have a hard time reading can see better. This function can be used during night photography for focusing. On my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra it gives a 300% magnification. But as I said, there will usually be only a limited amount of stars available. The best thing to do is to go into pro mode during daytime, find an object far away (like the horizon or a building several 100 meters away) and if possible, use magnification to see that you are in focus and manually focus on that object. Now your focus is digitally set and it will remain there as long as you are not altering it. So when you get out at night, focus is already set. This is the method I use for mobile photography at night.
Framing:
When you are trying to take pictures in a dark environment it is almost impossible to see what you are framing in your shot. You will basically only see a completely black screen. You might see a couple of the brightest stars, or the lights from a distant buildning or antenna. But thats generally it. So you have to frame your shot roughly, take a test shot, and then re-adjust if needed from how the picture looks. If the picture is too dark, raise the ISO so you can see what you are shooting. For framing purposes it doesn’t matter if you blow a lot of highlights. When you are happy with your framing you can lower the ISO so you dont risk blowing the highlight too much.
Why do I need to use a tripod, cameras have stabilizers today?
Yes, today’s cameras have stabilizers, but there are no camera, mobile or professional, that can keep a handheld camera still enough for the exposures needed at night. Stabilizers work only on very short exposures. So without a doubt, the most important improvement you can do, regardless of in which mode you use your phone, is using something that supports the phone keeping it from moving around. There is nothing else you can do or any setting you can alter that will improve the result even closely as much. It doesn’t matter how good camera you have if it’s moving during the exposure, that will 100% guaranteed ruin your shots. I highly recommend that you get yourself some kind of tripod to hold your camera.
If you absolutely do not want to use a tripod, then at least try to find something around you that you can rest your phone against. Be creative. You can set your phone on the ground leaning it against a stone, your gloves or something else on the ground. Sometimes there can be a rock that you can use, or take a piece of paper or plastics to cover the bottom of your phone and stick it down in the snow if it is winter. Using a tripod will however make life easier for you. You don’t have to use a large, bulky tripod. You will get a long way with a small and cheap mini tripod that can be carried in your pocket. If you want more flexibility in how high you can set your phone above the ground, use a slightly larger tripod. It won’t fit in your pocket, but will greatly increase your possibilities of framing the shots.
You can find cheap tripods for as little as $10-20. They will of course be of lower quality and are not suitable for heavier gear, but they will do the trick for mobile photography, as long as you have solid ground underneath and it is not extremely windy. If you can find a tripod with a hook under the head, you can hang your backpack or something else to provide some more stability to it. A cheap tripod won’t tolerate very heavy objects, but even a small backpack hanging there will make it way more stable. A high end professional sturdy tripod on the other hand will be able to withstand an adult standing on top of it! But the price tag will probably be somewhere around $1500-2000…
Everything has a very strange blue/green tint to it. And it’s not from the aurora, it’s the software going bananas with the colors and the white balance not knowing how to interpret the scene.