so this is basically my first ever star trails ... it's sort of a new thing to me ... it was shot on the same night as I shot my first milky way attempt ... too many firsts for a night ?
Now just like any firsts, there are those learning curves ... this one I think I shouldn't have shot at 16mm, it distorts the "circles" thanks to the wide angle lens properties, as you can see. I will probably poke around the 35mm - 50mm range next time.
These trails are a stack of 10 shots each taken at 16mm, 5mnt exposure at f4.0, ISO 1000
The slight "cloudiness" off to the right of the center of image is our dear milkyway.
You will also notice that the start trails are having a funny head... that's my little special effects ;) ... I love experimenting... this wasn't my intention when I was shooting. It sort of came into my head while I was procrastinating over the processing of these images.
So here's what I did in summary. One of these days I will write up a
short tutorial on it in my FaceBook page.
First I took the raw images in LR, washed them clean of noise and other stuff, did my usual touch ups and converted into JPGs. These I opened up them in StarTrails.exe and created the output file which had the streaking star trails all connected to form nice arcs, along with all of those annoying car headlights that had lit up some of the trees in the foreground.
So I loaded this image output of startrails.exe into GIMP, created a layer mask and opened up one of the frames where the trees had not been lit by car head lights and merged them together to form a regualr star trail image, with all the foreground trees in pitch black.
To this Image I added a transparency mask in GIMP, and put the last frame as the background layer. After playing around the transparency slider a bit (somewhere around 36) I ended up fading away the lines in the original star trails image while keeping the last frame bright. And voila ... ;)
I'm sort of hooked now ... can't wait for the next attempt ... Probably looking for an excuse to spend some dough on an LPS filter.
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[Nocturne], G.Tamás, Nath High, James Hellesen, and 22 other people added this photo to their favorites.
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sevensprings snowboarder 21 months ago | reply
stunning
mtdvetter 21 months ago | reply
Interesting...excellent work, thanks for the tips...sounds like a lot of work!
NightSnapper 17 months ago | reply
Stunning picture.
Love-BostonGirl 10 months ago | reply
This is amazing, especially for a first try at star trails. Excellent work!