Featured Photo

Featured Photo

Space; the Final Frontier. No, I’m not going start talking about this ship’s continuing voyages but I am going to talk a little about astrophotography. That really big word (which I do enjoy saying) just means taking pictures of stars, planets, and the moon. While it can cover such things as the pictures the Hubble Space Telescope took, in this instances I’m thinking more amateur and terra firma based.

Marc’s photo above is a great star trail photo. If you didn’t know, the night sky is in constant motion because the Earth is rotating. If you’re skilled enough, you can capture this motion in photo form in two ways. The easier (and that does not mean easy) way is to use film; using a low ISO, or low-light sensitive, film, a photographer can keep the camera’s shutter open for very long periods of time (as in hours) to capture the celestial movement.

The other way, which is what Marc did, is to take multiple shorter exposures (say 30 to 60 seconds each) and then layer them in a photo editing programming, like Photoshop, to combine them into a single shot. You might think this is cheating, but it’s the only way to do it with digital photography; since digital cameras are sensor based, not a physical medium like film, keeping a digital camera running long enough to capture star trails would overheat the sensor and ruin the shot. So layering multiple shots is the only way to achieve it. Also, combining dozens of shots is not a simple task. This is something I hope to try someday and I’m always thrilled to see photographers nail. Great work Marc!

Featured Photo

Featured Photo


…and the DJ Played All Night Long by Rolenz

I’m always awestruck when I see a photograph of star trails.  Like macro photographs, they show you things that your eyes can’t see on their own as well as show off the sexiness of photography.  While star trails can be captured with both film and digital cameras, digital gives you the advantage of creating a multiple exposure composite photo like the one above.  This shot, taken with a Nikon D90 near Skyline Drive, has an accumulated exposure time of about 60 minutes and is composed of twelve, 5 minute long exposures, taken at f/3.5, ISO 200, 18mm (according to the photographer).  Had this been shot with film, you would have to pray that your exposure was long enough to create the trails while not blowing out the light of the sunset.

Star trail photography takes a little bit of skill and a whole lot of patience.  You will definitely need a tripod of some sort, and make sure you have something in the foreground to make the shot more interesting.  Minimize the ambient light by getting as far away from city lights as you can and by shooting on a night with little to no moon.  You’ll likely want to use a wide angle lens and a big aperture to let in as much light as possible, and a low ISO setting to minimize noise.  If you have star trail photos of your own to share, leave them in the comments.