August 5, 2020
Star Trails, with some surprises.
I've long said star trails are easy to shoot, and they are since you are freed from many of the constraints that you normally face in landscape astrophotography. You don't have to worry about limiting exposure time to get pin point stars, you don't have to have the lens wide open to let in the most light possible and you don't need to bump up your ISO(light sensitivity). They do take a lot of time to shoot. Two of the shots you see here were 90 minute shots and one was 81 minutes. I generally shoot these in 30 second or 1 minute intervals and then put them together in post as well as the foreground. Since these are composed of multiple long exposures, having sufficient battery power, composition and proper focus on the stars is important. All of these shots are shots that needed to be retaken since one or several of these conditions were not met.
Read MoreI've long said star trails are easy to shoot, and they are since you are freed from many of the constraints that you normally face in landscape astrophotography. You don't have to worry about limiting exposure time to get pin point stars, you don't have to have the lens wide open to let in the most light possible and you don't need to bump up your ISO(light sensitivity). They do take a lot of time to shoot. Two of the shots you see here were 90 minute shots and one was 81 minutes. I generally shoot these in 30 second or 1 minute intervals and then put them together in post as well as the foreground. Since these are composed of multiple long exposures, having sufficient battery power, composition and proper focus on the stars is important. All of these shots are shots that needed to be retaken since one or several of these conditions were not met.
Star Trail at Joshua Tree
Star Trail over the rocks north of the the Ryan Mountain trailhead. One star trail below and slightly to the right of Polaris goes a bit off. This is because a flare from the ISS showed up in one of the shots. Again this was a re-shot due to the lens zoom moving. I shot the multi-row panorama so my lens was focused on the stars, I moved the tripod to get a more favorable position for Polaris over the rocks and the lens moved from 16mm to 20mm. I re-shot this with the same lens on my last trip to Joshua Tree taking great care to look at a one-to-one preview of the shot before I started taking the series of photos for the star trails.
