Startrail

Pricer

Pricer

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Name
Dave Price
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Had a go at this the other day. First time experimenting with all of this star trail stuff, this is the outcome,

Startrail1.jpg


comments most welcome

Cheers
Dave
 
Good strong trails there, however the only thing I'd say is the foreground interest isn't that...interesting.

Team those trails with a good landscape and you've got a winner.
 
Great star trails! I've tried this a couple of times with no success:( do you mind telling me what settings you used? Thanks
 
Pricer said:
Thank you. Would you get the same effect if you decreased the exposure time but increased the number of shots you took? Would the trails still be as prominant?

Cheers
Dave
Click to expand...

Aperture and ISO control the amount of starlight that reaches the sensor, shutter speed affects the length of each trail per frame while shooting duration controls the length of the trails overall.

Let's assume you used f/5.6 ISO400 and 30sec per frame for 50 frames.

Decreasing the shutter speed to 15 sec and increasing the number of frames to 100 would give you a similar result in the sky but the foreground would be darker.

Decreasing the shutter speed to 15 sec for 100 shots and boosting the ISO to 800 would give you a similar foreground but with more startrails. The length of startrails would remain the same.

You can adjust combinations of settings to allow you to shoot startrails in most ambient light conditions. In your situation for the church above, I would probably have tried to open the aperture or raise the ISO, primarily to gather more ambient light as I find the church and sky a little dark. Alternatively you could experiment with lightpainting the church structure- in which case do your lightpainting in the first couple of frames and again at the end- if you're halfway through a stack and your lightpainting goes wrong you'll kick yourself as to omit those frames will leave a noticeable gap in the trails.

There's a link in my sig to a blog post about this technique or if you can get your hands on a copy of Advanced Photographer May 2012 I wrote a startrail feature for that issue which included some PP tips not shown in the blog.
 
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Really listen and take on board what Andrew has posted above (y) I have to say I think that you've got the trails not far off at all but that said I think that more thought needs to be give to the composition and lighting of the foreground (y)

Matt
MWHCVT
 
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