Camera Help

So I bought a camera as I do a lot of sky watching I cant seams to get good pictures of the stars or moon. Mind you this is not the best camera in the world, but if I were to give make model could anyone help me out? I read the manual, but cant find nothing that I recognize as night vision or pictures at night info.

I have seen a few UFO's the past 2 years that is why I purchased this. i even had an incident I posted on here about seeing a "person" flying over a tree and not coming out the other side then moments later a low flying craft or something came by at a higher rate of speed(unable to make out if it was a jet or not it was pretty loud like a jet).

So this is why I purchased the camera.

Camera is: Kodak EasyShare M753

Also not sure if this is the right forum but since I got it for UFO investigation I figured it was.

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Any info on how to get good night shots?

reply to post by ExCloud


It's not going to be the best tool for the job to be honest, digital compacts have tiny sensors that get very noisy when the iso speed goes up and that's what will happen when you use this camera at night.

The noise will be so bad that the images won't be of much use, the alternative is to try and use a mode where the iso stays low but because it's night time the shutter speed will be so slow that anything you take a picture of will be blurry because of camera shake.

A tripod would be a good idea and setting the self timer so that you don't move the camera when you press the shutter button but even then if the object is moving it will come out blurred even if the rest of the picture is sharp.

It seems the camera has 17 scene modes so I would check if there is a night mode on there, make sure the flash is turned off because it won't do anything to help at night time.

If the object you are shooting is bright you might be ok because you only want the object to show up anyway, it doesn't matter if the rest of the scene is pitch black.

I would try practising on things like aeroplanes and see if you have any luck getting a mode that will just show the plane and the rest of the picture is pitch black (fast shutter speed)

It's easier on more advanced cameras because you can control the shutter speed but with an automatic camera it will try and expose the whole scene because it doesn't know you only want that little ufo to show up at the expense of everything else and the result of this will be a slow shutter speed as the camera tries to gather enough light to expose the picture properly.

There are no cameras that are really good at taking pictures of moving objects in the dark, there just isn't enough light there but digital slr cameras have much larger sensors which means there is less noise when you turn up the iso speed.

When you shoot in the dark the only way to keep the shutter speed high enough to avoid blur is to increase the iso speed, this is the sensitivity of the the sensor and the higher it goes the more noise you get.

But like I said, play around with the settings and see if you have any luck with something like aeroplanes.

what you want is the light of the plane to be relatively blur free and everything else pitch black, if you do it wrong you will get a blurry plane and rest of the picture will start to show up.

This is what you don't want:

farm1.static.flickr.com...

And this is more like what you do want:

www.supernaturalparanormal.com...


If you can get it to shoot aeroplanes like in the second pic then remember what setting you used and that will be about the best way of trying to shoot ufo's with that camera.

You can try slower shutter speeds and they will reveal more of what's there but they will be so blurry you wont be able to make any detail out.

[edit on 19-8-2008 by fatdeeman]

My girlfriend(engaged) has some like $1000.00 camera its called like a Nikon D50 or some number. I can rarely use it without her permission(she is a graphiic designer/photographer. She loves me and i love her but my belief in aliens she doesnt get heh. So I purchased the most megapixel one that was around $200.00 maybe I should buy a video camera? Are those better for catching ufos and cheaper?

reply to post by ExCloud


One problem with a relatively inexpensive still camera, such as yours (and such as the one I own) is that it lacks sufficient zoom to really zoom in on what your looking for, and in general it is harder to get pictures of things in the night sky with them.

I have found that my moderately inexpensive ($200 to $300) video camera can be more useful for capturing moving objects in the night sky. For example, I was out watching the perseids on Aug 12th, and I was able to get fairly clear images of stars and airplanes using the video camera with its optical zoom (mine has 12x optical zoom). Many new camcorders have optical zooms of like 20 to 30x, which is great (just beware of digital zoom - it makes things blurry). Even on these types of camcorders, you can usually manually control the exposure and focus, so you are able to get a clear image of bright things in an otherwise dark night sky!

Hope this helps