Crazy Vortex Star trails.

nickjohnwatson

nickjohnwatson

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Nick
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I made these last night, the star vortex is actually made up from one image of the night sky thats layered, rotated and shrunk gradually via an action in photoshop.
Its surprisingly easy to do, and although its a bit gimmicky, it still looks cool as hell i think :)

War of the worlds.


Warkorth Vortex


Would love to hear your thoughts?

Nick
 
There one thing IMO that's letting both of these down a bit it's more visible in the castle one though, and that is you can still see the original stars in the background of the vortex stars...

The effect sure is striking as I do quite like it, but part of me feels its a little too much manipulation, I can see this being a short lived fashion...I cannot really talk on the manipulation front hell I stuck a star trail over a light trail that to most photographers would be obvious manipulation but its my most popular image and was even sold a few months back via Getty's NYC office...I only wish I knew what it was used for :LOL:

What will say is that you've processed them well on the whole, and you've positioned the vortex perfectly to make really strong images the first is one of the best of the style I've seen, mainly as I love that foreground structure, I loved it on the original stock star trails
 
Mikehamilton said:
i would be interested in seeing the work flow of getting this, as you say it was a photoshop action, but was that just for the rotate and shrinking? or the stacking also?
Click to expand...

Here you go mate. Its pretty easy to do it all :)

The only thing that it doesnt say in the video is when you layer it over your foreground image you need to change the blend mode of the final stacked image to Lighten to get the stars to show but not the background colour :)

 
nickjohnwatson said:
Here you go mate. Its pretty easy to do it all :)

The only thing that it doesnt say in the video is when you layer it over your foreground image you need to change the blend mode of the final stacked image to Lighten to get the stars to show but not the background colour :)

Click to expand...

Thanks mate :)

Will be something interesting to try with a car shot :)
 
nickjohnwatson said:
I'm gonna have another play with them later as the original stars in the base images ruin them i agree.
I think it is just a short lived fad but its always fun to experiment :)
Click to expand...

I agree wholeheartedly the day we stop experimenting is the day we should hand up our cameras (y)
 
There's a guy on Flickr does this (Hakka69 I think) but he made a zooming device to do it in camera automatically - it's certainly a different take on star trails and seems to be catching on.
 
nickjohnwatson said:
Here you go mate. Its pretty easy to do it all :)

The only thing that it doesnt say in the video is when you layer it over your foreground image you need to change the blend mode of the final stacked image to Lighten to get the stars to show but not the background colour :)

Click to expand...

Seen many of his images in a FB group. Everyone keeps asking how to do it lol. I'll have to give it a try sometime. He always said it was done by some sort of zooming machine, or it might have been someone else. Can't remember.

Nice shots by the way. I've seen your wee tower shots on FB as well and really like that one.
 
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