Night Photography to shoot Star Trails

This is one of the 50 frames that make up my star trails photo. You can see the cup of the big dipper in the lower left of the frame and the cup of the little dipper in the upper right corner. The north star is in the middle.

For this shot I took 50 photographs with my camera set to 30 sec, f 2.8, 400 ISO. The lens was a 24-70 mm zoom set at 24 mm.

What can I say, I thought this photo was an error at the time. I had moved from one side of the park to the other and was setting up for the next series of shots. I needed to change the drive mode in my camera, my intention was to aim the camera at polaris (north star) and take star trails, but I forgot that I needed to hold the shutter down until the total number of shots (50) had been taken. My plan was to take 50 shots at 30 sec each. After I triggered the shutter, I noticed that my camera was not pointing at the polar star during this shot, so I let it complete the exposure. I thought the cars coming into the parking lot shining their headlights on the foreground were ruining my exposure as well. Considering all that happened, I am sure that had I intended to make this shot it would have taken more one try.

This shot as mentioned by others on this trip was hard to capture.  This was a 40 sec exposure at 3200 ISO.  It shows a lot of star detail, but it took quite a lot of editing to get rid of the colour cast. The light pollution of the city combined with the air pollution caused the lower half of the phot0 to glow orange yellow.

This is a composite photograph. I take about 20 to 30 photos then stack them to get a long exposure look.

Interesting night, and show the value of  a club outing.  Had Mike and Geoff not offered some helpful tips I don't think I would have captured this.  What I learned about this exercise is:

• There is a fair amount of hits and misses in taking the photo.  I used the rule of 500 dividing my lens by 500 to determine the length of time the shutter stayed open, and then jacking up the ISO to at lest 1200.  

• The glow from the city that came over the hills is an issue, which only gets brighter the long you leave the shutter open. 

• Foreground is essential. We all tried just shooting some shots up at the sky, but I think for the image to have any effect foreground is important, and the mountains and island looking down the Sound are key to a okay composition. 

• None of these photos are "out of the camera" kind of shots.  There is a heck of a lot of post production needed. 

If was fun and thanks for all the help.

Most people were trying to shoot the Milky Way, but one of the other exercises suggested was to shoot star trails.  I didn't have enough patience to sit there half the night ... but did do 5 2-minute exposures to create a 10 minute set of trails. (supposedly multiple exposures reduces the noise from hot pixels from running the CCD for an extended period of time.)

the fuzzy smears near the center of the image is the Milky Way as it moves across the sky.

30 seconds of member activity on the dock. A car's headlights played over the area, doing some unexpected light painting on the structure.

I faced the issue I often have with Canon and night photography, it seems to really pick up the sodium vapour wavelengths of the city's street lights. Since the light is added into the exposure itself, it's hard to remove without taking some of the exposure with it.  This is the best of the few tries I did, but the muddiness of the remaining colour cast at the bottom remains.

Like most, I fought with the colour cast of city light pollution. In a last ditch effort, went to B&W.

Some of the galactic dust clouds can be seen.

Technically not sunset, since the sun was wel below horizon at this point. beefed up saturation and adding some vignetting on a 2 second exposure

Nikon DX format sensor; Sigma 10mm-20mm zoom lense at approximate 15mm. Autoexposure using sunset scene mode. Exposure and colour temperature adjusted in Lightroom.

Nikon DX format sensor; Sigma 10mm-20mm zoom lense at approximate 15mm; f3.5 for 30 second exposure. Exposure and colour temperature adjusted in Lightroom; miscellaneous artifacts in foreground spot corrected in Photoshop. The Milky Way is just beginning to show in this image, 26 October 2019 19:50