NikonGear'23
Images => Themes, Portfolio Series, PaW, or PaM => Topic started by: Jan Anne on October 14, 2015, 00:15:34
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For me a photo trip is not complete without at least one cool star trail shot, here are a few of my all time favourites.
Exposure is roughly around the half hour mark at base ISO with long exposure noise reduction enabled, the used gear and locations are mentioned below each photo as usual.
So, what are your favourite star trails shots?
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5723/21907961670_ff7523a4c7_o.jpg)
Sony a7S & Voigtlander 15/4.5 LTM, last weekend in the NL
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7301/9797632945_0729753d07_o.jpg)
Nikon D800E & Samyang 14/2.8, Sweden 2013
(https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8057/8271512613_9a02d2b2ae_o.jpg)
Nikon D800E & Samyang 14/2.8, Spain 2012
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It's difficult to compete with your star trails, JA!
Here is the Slovenian fluke :)
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Nice! Something I'd like to try one of these nights. TY for the inspiration!
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Here is the Slovenian fluke :)
Rather a coincidental collection of events :)
Seriously, what are the odds that a plane flies over that ski lift drawing those vertical lines crossing the startrails???
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Rather a coincidental collection of events :)
Seriously, what are the odds that a plane flies over that ski lift drawing those vertical lines crossing the startrails???
Worth noting is that I didn't shoot it with a fish-eye, but a 300mm lens 8)
Also, it was Erik and you noticing the plane at all, I wasn't even aware of it.
Must be karma 8)
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In short, serendipity. Karma might result as a bonus.
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I have only tried it once, with D300 and about 2 hour exposure at ISO200, NR switched on.
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wow I have never even done this -
the images posted are truly beautiful
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Speaking of serendipity, this is a photo from our last year's get together in Montenegro.
We were based in Scepan Polje, a confluence of 3 rivers Tara + Piva = Drina.
The place is perfect for rafting, hence wet-suits, hence these hangers that are used to dry wet-suits (why would you want to dry something that is called wet).
Anyway, I was smart enough to pick up an IR camera, place it underneath the hangers and point it into the sky.
Little did my intelligence know that there was a light sensor (more than clearly visible in this image) placed above the window.
I am not certain who triggered the light sensor but my image got ruined. Or did it?
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Wonderful images. What are the basic steps to produce such images?
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Wonderful images. What are the basic steps to produce such images?
Very easy actually:
- Find the North (or South) Pool star on a clear night
- Shoot it with a wide angle at base ISO, wide open or one stop down
- I usually expose roughly for half an hour, longer exposure makes longer circles
Do some high ISO shots in advance to determine the composition.
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Thanks for the explanation, gotta have to try that :)
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Jørgen, don't ask me I am useless :)
Any camera, any lens, ISO 100, High NR on, f/5.6, and chose your shutter speed between 5 and 30 minutes.
Avoid light pollution and of course, it would be nice if it's not a cloudy night ::)
Even the moon has a tendency of polluting the image.
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Yeah, avoiding light polution is getting more and more difficult.
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Some stunning images here!
Here are a few of mine:
They are all stacked images, 25-30 second exposures wide open at pretty high ISO's.
The first is D7000 + Nikkor 12-24 f4, the next two are D7000 + Sigma 10-20 f4.5-5.6 and the last is D750 + Tamron 15-30 f2.8
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These are some great shots. Here is one my only star trails, from many years ago. Annapurna region in Nepal
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I really love this one, thanks for posting.
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ooooh, these are great.
The key is to find a good foreground and to expose well, ideally for a very long time.
Modern techniques (stacking) allow actually to do star trails even in cities since light does not accumulate for more than typically 30 seconds in each shot, even for cumulative times of several hours.
i have done a technical trial in my garden in august, (X-T1, Nikkor 16mm fisheye) with a time of about 4 hours.
What I have learnt:
- I should find a place away from the airport
- the foreground sucks here...
- It is technically quite easy to do.
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Olivier, this is impressive (as all your photos are)!
I love the planes!
How many images did you stack, and were all your exposures 30s?
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amazing shot Olivier - 4 hours hey - just to get those pesky planes in the shot ! :)
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Yes, all pictures were 30s exposures. 500 runs if I remember well while I was sleeping! Very easy to do and to finish in PS.
Actually this was done in the middle of the night, when Charles de Gaulle airport (30km away) is supposed to be almost closed.
Had I done that earlier the picture would be filled with hundreds of plane trails. There is probably one every minute in daytime and in the evening, but not really a nuisance as they are already quite high and can barely be heard.
Actually I should repeat the experiment in winter when the night falls much earlier, just for the fun of having as many planes in the shot as stars. I could also do a longer exposure than in summer.
999 shots is the maximum with the timer, and it is likely anyway that the battery will not last longer. 999*30 sec = more than 8 hours. Hopefully I will not get too much condensation on the lens, this really ruins the shots...
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Interestingly different results with the stacked images, should try it one day.
Btw, where did the Pole star go in the stacked images :o
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Olivier, that is spectacular!
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Jan Anne, it is visible on mine!
And I am fairly sure Peter's were shot in the southern hemisphere
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Well I don't see a bright fixed Pole star, only trails in both your and Peters images.
Fanie (SP) and I (NP) used single exposures and the Pole star is a fixed bright dot for both the South and North Pole star.
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...
- I should find a place away from the airport
Please don't. The plane trails really add to the picture.
- the foreground sucks here...
Not so bad at all, but if you'd manage to find some modern tall buildings in the foreground, i'd feel you would really have a winner here.
Great shot !!
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Jan Anne, the Pole Star (Polaris) is not exactly at the pole, so it is perfectly normal it moves a bit when earth rotates.
look at the map at this page: http://www.sky-watch.com/skytour/umi.html
Polaris' coordinates are (found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris)
Right ascension 02h 31m 49.09s
Declination +89° 15′ 50.8″
By definition, the pole is at a declination of +90°. So Polaris is almost at 45' from the pole. Remember this is more than the moon's apparent diameter in the sky (approx 30').
This has nothing to do with stacking ot not stacking!
HCS: thank you, you are being too kind. I made the shot to find the appropriate settings. Now let me find a good place. Fanie, for instance, found a much better one!
I wanted to do this while including the tallest erected stone in Eurome (Monhit de Kerloas in Brittany) but there was so much condensation on the lens that night that I finally gave up. There will be other opportunities...
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Here is one, made with a different technique.
Loads (and I mean loads!) of 30s exposures, put together with StarstaX (free app).
Overall exposure time was ~2h30'
I concur with Olivier's statement about foreground and planes.
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Jan Anne, the Pole Star (Polaris) is not exactly at the pole, so it is perfectly normal it moves a bit when earth rotates.
This has nothing to do with stacking ot not stacking!
Yes I know and yes it does, kind of :)
In all my single half hour exposed images Polaris is a slightly off centre dot, apparently it does turn into a trail at multiple hour exposures. So it is not directly linked to the stacking itself but to the much longer exposures used for this method. Longer single exposures should show the same result as well however.
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Great contributions everybody, thanks for sharing the amazing images and the techniques used to acquire them.
Just out of curiosity, why do some prefer the stacking method over the single exposure method?
For me personally I like the single exposures because they enable me to combine the star trails with the ambient light only seen at long exposures, like the orange glow of the campfire and the green remnants of the Northern Lights in my second shot and the yellow glow from the villages in the valley below in the third shot.
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Simone,
Thank you for the ref to the stacking software.
You obviously worked with a less than clean sky!
Jan Anne: I see several advantages for stacking vs one single long exposure frame.
1. Stacking allows you to work at higher ISO without the risk of over exposing parts of the picture. especially the sky itself will remain as dark as in one single short exposure.
2. Especially you can try star trails in the city, with quite luminous foregrounds. See the attached picture (many 20 second exposures) and imagine what it would be with a single 45min exposure)
3. in case something goes wrong during the process of acquiring the shots (unwanted plane, someone pointing a flashlight directly to the camera...), you can always eliminate the specific frame and keep the rest.
The nice thing is that the stacking is done in "lighten" mode, so only the brightest part of each shot are kept.
I agree that long exposures allow for better visibility of the foreground in dark areas. But with stacking, you always have the possibility to add a longer exposure to the mix, possibly with a higher ISO setting.
example taken near Paris, inside the city of Auvers sur Oise (where Jan Anne's fellow citizen Van Gogh lived his last days). This was another technical trial, stopped prematurely because of the arrival of an excessive amount of clouds.
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Great contributions everybody, thanks for sharing the amazing images and the techniques used to acquire them.
Just out of curiosity, why do some prefer the stacking method over the single exposure method?
For me personally I like the single exposures because they enable me to combine the star trails with the ambient light only seen at long exposures, like the orange glow of the campfire and the green remnants of the Northern Lights in my second shot and the yellow glow from the villages in the valley below in the third shot.
The very reasons you mention could push you toward a multi-exposure strategy in some circumstances.
For example when diffuse light (i.e. light pollution) is at levels where a very long exposure would lead to too light a sky, even at base ISO.
Also very long exposures accumulate noise. One could do long exposure noise reduction but that doubles the time the camera has to stay on, possibly exceeding the battery life.
(Alternatively one could shoot a dark frame and subtract it later, but I would not know how to do it)
On the other hand multi-exposures have their problems too. Joi9ning them without forming gaps in the star trails requires some tricks.
In my case I used many exposures mainly because I did not have a remote to keep the shutter open during the bulb exposure!
I had to resort to the intervalometer and the longest exposure available was 30s.
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Jan, mine were in the southern hemisphere, where there is no pole star. We have the southern cross, but it only points to the south, none of the stars are actually at the south axis.
I prefer stacking because most of my attempts at single exposures have been ruined by people with lights.
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Simone,
Thank you for the ref to the stacking software.
You obviously worked with a less than clean sky!
Thanks!
Yes, I did have quite a few drifting clouds that came after I had started the intervalometer.
Making a composite has alleviated the problem a little - it would be much worse if I had a single exposure - but I had to throw away many frames.
Overall the photo works as a proof of concept bu I have not managed yet a satisfactory one.
I live in a very cloudy and densely populated place so opportunities are incredibly rare for me (also considered that I have a day job and a family!).
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Inspired by this thread, I did my first somewhat successful stacked star trails last night. I had several failed attempts at making the interval timer of my D5100 work for 30 second exposures the previous nights. A little searching showed that a number of others had the same problems. I finally tried a 35 second interval as a search result suggested and that worked, but why? I also noticed that even with the interval that long, the time from the shutter closed until it opened again was only a couple of seconds. Then I timed the actual exposure and found it to be 32.3 seconds :o . So it seems that there are some inaccuracies in exposure timing, but not in the interval. Thus I have to set a longer time interval than expected to allow writes to the card and closing and opening of the shutter.
The image is more a proof of concept at a comfortable location right outside the door to my cabin, so not a very nice foreground. It was stacked from raw files with the free DeepSkyStacker in average mode with registering turned off. Even at 100% view there are no signs of dotting of the trails. This is probably because the fisheye makes each step very small and the 2.5 sec gaps cannot be resolved.
(http://otoien.zenfolio.com/img/s4/v11/p1574574534.jpg)
Nikon 10.5mm @ f/3.2, 120 exposures of 30 sec., ISO 100 (by accident).
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My lens collection is very limited and the wides I have is the Nikon 24-70mm. Will that do or should I not bother trying?
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Jørgen, any lens will work. The photo I posted was made with a 300mm lens ;)
Your 24-70 is perfect :)
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Øivind: I am impressed by how high the pole is in your sky! Not surprising of course given your location.
Jørgen: 24 is wide enough. The key is not to get everything in, it is to compose well like for any kind of photography.
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I had several failed attempts at making the interval timer of my D5100 work for 30 second exposures the previous nights. A little searching showed that a number of others had the same problems. I finally tried a 35 second interval as a search result suggested and that worked, but why? I also noticed that even with the interval that long, the time from the shutter closed until it opened again was only a couple of seconds. Then I timed the actual exposure and found it to be 32.3 seconds
It is easiest to just set the camera at serial and lock the remote release. If D5100 has such options...
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Savin kuk, Zabljak, Montenegro.
An infrared long exposure D200 + 16/3.5 fish-eye.
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After seeing Olivier's planes, I tried some of my own, but almost specifically trying to get the planes.
This is 45 minutes worth of 30-second exposures with 100mm focal length.
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Another stack.