Corey Rich teaches how to take a starry sky time lapse in new Nikon Behind The Scenes video

In the not-too-distant past, we shared a couple of beautiful time lapse videos that showed great landscapes, starry skies, aurorae and more. Watching these videos is often a mesmerizing experience, but most of us truly have little to no idea about how they're properly made. Lucky for us, there are educational videos available online, which talk about these kinds of things.

Nikon USA recently started a new series of videos, where it has its Ambassadors talk about various photographic techniques. The series started out with flash guru Joe McNally talking about proper lighting, and the most recent video features outdoor photographer Corey Rich, who explains how to properly take a starry sky time lapse with a Nikon D800 DSLR.

The great advantage of the D800 for time lapse shooters is that the camera features a built-in interval mode. That means that you don't have to hook it up to a remote intervalometer first and can set the timing right in the camera menu.

Most important, he hightlights, is that you set up your gear during the day, before it gets dark. The last thing you'd want to do is fumble with your camera's buttons in the dark -- especially not when you're high up in the mountains wearing gloves and an insulated jacket, like Corey Rich is in the video. Then, you should figure out your composition before programming the interval shooting.

Finally, you have to set the correct values for ISO, aperture and shutter speed, in order to get properly exposed images. If you're shooting a starry sky, keep in mind that the longer the exposure, the more likely the stars are to appear as trails in the resulting images. Now that's as much as we're going to give away here, as we don't want to spoil the experience of watching the video for you.

More Nikon Behind the Scenes videos and other tutorials can be found on Nikon USA's YouTube channel.

(via SLR Lounge)