Tips and Frequently Asked Questions

You don’t need a tripod for Long Exposure or Light Trails any more. NightCap aligns each frame as you shoot, so handheld shots come out sharp. Just keep the target inside the box on screen – the box shows how much the shot is drifting, so as long as the target stays inside it, alignment is doing its job.

In these two modes, a tripod still gives the best results in two situations:

• Very long exposures. Alignment handles shorter shots comfortably, but once you’re shooting for minutes or hours a tripod is the way to go.

• Zoomed in. Zoom amplifies every small movement, so the target drifts out of the box much faster. At high zoom levels such as 10x it’s hard to hold steady enough even for a short exposure, and a tripod will often help.

The Astronomy modes (Stars, Star Trails, ISS and Meteor) are a different matter: those still need a tripod or another way to hold your device still.

Tripods come in all shapes and sizes, including very cheap pocket sized devices designed to hold an iPhone.

To increase brightness, NightCap slows the camera down, giving it more time to absorb more light, but it also slows down focusing.

In very low light NightCap’s assisted focusing helps you get fast, reliable focus. You can manually adjust the focus by simply sliding your finger left and right near the bottom of the picture.

NightCap needs some light to work its magic, but if you simply hold still the app will adjust the camera for you and the picture will get brighter. If it’s very dark turning on Light Boost can help.

If it’s still too dark, you’ll have to use the flash or other lighting.

NightCap uses a focusing aid in very low light, which helps you to get better and faster focusing. For best results it needs to learn about your iPhone’s camera. You can help it to learn quickly by using NightCap outdoors in daylight – doing so helps the app quickly learn the exact properties of your camera so it knows exactly how to get best focus.

Training the focus system

You can check how well it has learned. In daylight, let the app focus on something far away and watch the FOC value on screen: once the system has enough data it will settle at 100.

If it settles somewhere short of 100, it needs more practice. Point the camera at something very close and let it focus, then point it back at the horizon or another distant object and let it focus again. Repeat this until FOC settles at 100.

Each lens learns separately, so repeat the process for every lens you plan to shoot with.

Night Mode gives the camera longer to capture light. It’s available for video and time lapse recording – for photos it’s enabled automatically. What it does differs between the two:

Night Mode for video

Use it when you’re recording in very low light and don’t need the smoothest possible video. It lowers the frame rate, which allows a longer exposure for each frame and so captures more light. The result is brighter, less grainy video, at the cost of some smoothness.

Where possible it uses a special camera mode too. This isn’t available on all devices, but where available it uses a special lower resolution camera mode that provides much better performance in low light.

Night Mode for time lapse

Here it simply allows a much longer exposure for each frame, which makes it the best choice for very low light. Because time lapse frames are already spaced apart, it has no effect on the motion in your finished recording.

Light Boost

Use Light Boost when your shot looks a little dark, or when you want to brighten shadowed areas. It simply boosts brightness, it’s available for both photo and video, and there is no downside to using it.

Long exposure mode (blurred star)

This produces a natural long exposure effect – moving objects show motion blur, and you’ll get very very low noise levels. Use for:

• Low noise photos in low light
• Motion blur

Light trails mode (extended star)

This preserves the brightest parts of anything moving. Use for:

• Fireworks – tutorial
• Light painting – tutorial
• Star trails – tutorial
• Moving night-time traffic

Astronomy modes

These modes are designed to help you photograph stars, star trails, meteors and the International Space Station. They set the camera up for you automatically, and also show a popup explaining how they work before you start the shot.

NightCap slows the camera down, giving it time to absorb more light and create a brighter image. The downside is that the camera takes longer to automatically focus.

In very low light the assisted focusing will activate automatically, making focusing quick and reliable. If needed there’s also full manual control, so you can simply slide your finger left and right near the bottom of the camera view to adjust focus.

If you’re shooting something fairly close, and you don’t want the background or natural lighting, use the flash.

If you’re shooting something further away, or you want the background to be visible or you want to capture natural lighting, turn the flash off.

The iPhone / iPad cameras are limited to between 1/3 second and 1 second exposure (shutter speed) depending on which model you have. This is set by Apple, and we can’t work around it unfortunately. To take that further, in long exposure or light trails mode the app captures camera data continuously and combines it into a single image.

That means the “camera” exposure time is limited, but you can get much longer exposures in practice. It also means that you can take long exposures in daylight without needing any camera filters.

In Long Exposure it doesn’t get brighter like it does on a traditional camera, because that quickly blinds the camera and you don’t actually gain much light sensitivity. Instead, the technique we use reduces image noise while preserving detail, so you can use much higher ISO than normal in low light (you’ll get decent quality shots even at ISO 4000 or higher). You’ll also get long exposure effects like blurring for anything moving past the camera.

Combining frames this way is also what lets you shoot Long Exposure handheld: the app aligns each frame as it goes, so small movements don’t blur the result. Just keep the target inside the box on screen.

NightCap Camera requires access to various parts of your device in order to work correctly. It’ll ask for permission to access them when you first launch the app, or later if you decline and then try to use a feature that requires them.

Camera and Photo Library: Access to these is required when you first open the app. It can’t work without access to the camera, and without access to the photo library it can’t save or display photos or videos.

iOS lets you grant save only, full or limited access. With save only, NightCap’s built in photo/video viewer won’t work. Limited access allows you to specify which photos the camera can access.

Whatever you choose, your photos never leave your device and we will never have access to them.

Microphone: Access is required for recording video (without it the video will have no sound). If you don’t allow this, it will be requested when you first use video mode. If you refuse access, videos will be recorded without sound and a “no microphone” icon will display - tap it for instructions on restoring access.

Location: Only required if you want geo-tagging. This tags your photos and videos with the location you took them at, allowing you to search for photos by place or view them on a map. Can be toggled in the in-app settings.

We don’t use these features for anything other than making the app work, and we have no access to any of your data at all. NightCap Camera doesn’t need or use an internet connection.

The iPhone’s camera can focus “beyond infinity”. To make focusing easier, NightCap Camera works out exactly where infinite focus should be. This means you can set focus to 100 and it should be just right.

However, because the camera in every iPhone is slightly different, the app needs to learn about your camera before it’s perfect. As it learns, it improves, and focusing gets more and more accurate.

You can help it to learn quickly by using NightCap Camera outdoors in daylight. Doing so helps the app quickly learn the exact properties of your camera so it knows exactly how to get best focus.

To check its progress, let the app focus on a distant object in daylight and watch the FOC value: once it has enough data it will settle at 100. If it stops short of 100, focus on something very close, then on the horizon again, and repeat until it settles. Each lens learns separately, so do this for every lens you use.

On iPhone 16 and later, NightCap Camera supports Apple’s Camera Control button. You can switch lenses, zoom and adjust focus with it, and it handles the volume buttons as a shutter too. There’s nothing to turn on – it just works.

On older devices you can use the volume buttons as a shutter button.

Remote shutters

Either way, you can also fire the shutter remotely with any headphones that have a volume control (including the ones that came with your iPhone), or any bluetooth shutter release that’s compatible with iPhone.

AirPods work too, but that one is switched on in your AirPods settings rather than in NightCap.

Shooting without touching the screen is particularly handy in the dark, and when your device is on a tripod, where tapping the screen risks nudging it out of position.

This can be caused by two things:

1. If you have Rotation Lock turned on. This prevents the iPhone interface from rotating as you rotate the device, but it also blocks NightCap from knowing which orientation the device is in. In this case, all photos and videos will always be in portrait mode. You can check if you have Rotation Lock turned on by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to show the iPhone control center. Rotation Lock is a padlock with a circular arrow around it. It will be red if it’s turned on.

2. If you’re taking photos or videos with the phone pointing upwards or downwards, then it won’t know whether to use landscape or portrait (the iPhone uses gravity to work out which way it’s pointing, and if it’s pointing up or down landscape and portrait are the same). To avoid this issue, try pointing the camera at the horizon before you start.

If you are experiencing crashing in NightCap Camera please contact us for support.

Remember to tell us what iPhone or iPad model you are using and try to describe what happens. This will help us to find out what the problem is and get it fixed quickly.

We’re frequently asked about NightCap Camera for Android phones. Unfortunately the app works very closely with the hardware, and it needs to be carefully tuned for every device it runs on so the app already requires a lot of work with just the iPhone.

Supporting Android really wouldn’t be practical because of the wide range of devices, and not all Android devices are capable of running the app. As a small company it’s not viable in terms of resources and development costs so we’re not planning an Android version at the moment.