Click on the image for licensing terms
This is the one of the few sucessful star trails photos I've been able to make so far, and it shows the view over the Vale of Clwyd, with Prestatyn and the Moel-Y-Parc radio transmitter in the background.
A little information as to how I made this image might be interesting, and will certainly help me remember what I did for next time! So here goes with a description of the workflow.
First off, I had no intention of making a star trails photo when I ventured out into the cold and dark of a winter's morn in North Wales, thankfully clear for once. No, what I had in mind was to produce a timelapse video sequence showing the stars wheeling over the Vale of Clwyd and Prestatyn, and you can see the results of that effort here or on my Vimeo gallery. (Link in the menu above).
To do this I used my trusty Canon 5D fitted with a 24-105 zoom used wide open at f4. The camera was mounted on a sturdy tripod and controlled with a Canon programmable timer. I set the ISO to 400 and the exposure to 10 seconds and let the camera fire away continuously for an hour, until the sky had lightened to the point where the stars were no longer visible.
I had to change the battery during this sequence, and you can see the gap in the star trails where this happened.
This gave me around 360 exposures, which I fed into Adobe Premier Pro to make the timelapse video, but could I get an extra bonus out of these exposures? After all I had frozen my backside off up a mountain to get them.
Sometime ago I'd downloaded some free software from www.startrails.de but never yet had the chance to use it, so I thought I'd fire it up and give it a try.
Normally a star trails image is put together using PhotoShop, with a layer for each exposure and with the blend mode set to 'lighten'. However, I quailed at the thought of doing this for 360 exposures. Both me and my computer would have lost the will to live long before I'd finished doing that.
However, loading the exposures into 'Star Trails' was a breeze, and I could watch as the software slowly painted my star trails across the sky.
The final output from 'Star Trails' was fed into PhotoShop for my standard range of image enhancements to give me the 'look' I was after, et voila. A finished star trails image I'm really pleased with. The video wasn't bad either!
Filename - stars trails 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 10secs @ f4, ISO400
Location - Prestatyn, North Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - ACR, PS-CS2 & startrails.de
Comments - Multiple exposures blended together
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.