Super-sharp starry skies

Ditch AF and focus manually

Achieving pin-sharp focus at night can be very tricky. The low light will confuse your camera’s AF system, so best practice is to focus manually. In fact, our Irix 15mm f/2.4 Blackstone is a manual focus-only lens. For the best results we’d recommend taking one shot with your foreground perfectly in-focus and a second shot with the stars perfectly in-focus, before merging the images together in post-production to create a scene with front-to-back sharpness. Zooming into Live View will allow you to refine your focus with pin-point accuracy.

When focusing on the foreground, momentarily shine a bright torch on the object to create a reference point on which to focus on. When focusing on the starry sky, simply setting the focus ring to infinity might not be accurate enough. Instead, ensure you select a bright example star to work with and refine your focus via Live View from there.