So I thought I'd post a reject of mine from Friday night, really just as an exercise in showing lessons learned so that others might reap the benefit too. One of my side projects has been to get some decent startrail shots. Last Friday was clear for once (hallelujah, it's been grim and cloudy in the UK for 6 weeks) so off I trapsed, set up my gear in the woods and let it do its thing there for 2hr 30. This was the result:
It's obviously a total reject so here are various thoughts.
- WB, set it low to make the sky look blue rather than ghastly orange
if you're near any city.
- The longer the better, this is about 1.5 hrs stitched together I
think
- I shot for longer but condensation on the lens made the rest
unuseable. I've added some of the condensation in at the top on
purpose to show the effect, it's that weird streak in the blue at the
top. I am buying a couple of hand held fans that'll run on batteries
for hrs which I'll mount near the lens and leave running to deal with
this.
- Aeroplanes can be annoying, but also attractive. They're not that
hard to cancel out though if you want, because they only take place in
a few of the frames
- I used continuous mode on this with a remote. It gives the smallest
time between exposures so the trails marry up best when you merge them
all
- I used startrails.exe to stitch them, a great freebie
- Lightpainting is best done softly and before the main take. This
needs a lot more experimentation but the concept is sound I think,
especially on old monuments which I'll tackle once I get the machanics
firmly down. I bought some big yellow 20 million lux thing from ebay
for £20 for this, did the job perfectly. takes 16 hrs to charge
though. Note to self, *remember to shine a lot more on the distant
trees* :)
- Plan ahead with charging because this was a spur of the moment
thing. My battery wasn't full nor the lamp charged
- I have a headband headlamp thing, very useful for hands free
operation when it's dark. I recommend it
- To compose, set camera to highest iso, take a pic, then recompose
afterwards based on the result. Make sure to remember to iso down
afterwards :)
- Typical exposure was 30 secs, f8, iso 400. A little on the dark side
so I had to adjust all the raws in bridge
- Be very alert when lightpainting that closer stuff is much brighter.
Ie see that bush on the right
- To find polaris, the star that they all turn round, look at the bear
and follow the last 2 points (google finding Polaris). In the southern
hemisphere you're looking for the southern cross. I'm a geek and
always carry a compass round in my car so that when I see decent
locations I can check what the view is like looking towards Polaris.
- This was Pentax 10-17mm fisheye corrected with ptlens, a very cool
lens correction software. You do need a seriously wide lens to get
this stuff, and you'd be surprised at just how steep an angle you need
to point it up
- note that I have a silly 30 second limitation on startrail work
because the K-7 won't let you turn it off above 30 seconds.
if anyone else has stuff they want to add as lessons for others feel free to post :)
marinela 2008, GYaw Ho, titoalfredo, Light❖, and 180 other people added this photo to their favorites.
View 20 more comments
A.R.Khomarian 7 months ago | reply
wonderful shot!
Jose HL 7 months ago | reply
Una maravilla.Good shot
fotolady1 7 months ago | reply
great work, great shot, very useful tutorial, thanks for share!!!
nyaaly 7 months ago | reply
Very beautiful work! I love the stars, the airplanes and the woods. Thank you for the lesson of photography. And thank you that you added me as contact, is an honor.