Photos

This is my first stab at shooting some star trails and was taken from the same location as my last few submissions in Rawtenstall, Lancashire.

The sky was clear when I started, and I took a couple of test shots at ISO 800, f/5.6 for 30s which seemed to just about make the stars visible enough to expect to be able to get the star trail effect. I tried to compose the scene so that there was something other than the sky in the shot, so included the lights from Rawtenstall town centre and the bushes and wall in the foreground.

I then left it on continuous shoot, taking 30s exposures for about an hour whilst I went inside and watched the football!

I then converted all the shots to JPEG (having played around with the white balance) and used startrails.de to generate the merged image for the star trails using about 100 shots. I also included a single all-black exposure, as apparently this helps with the contrast.

As you can see a large cloud moved into the shot during the hour that the images were taken, so I layered the merged image on top of one of the originals in Gimp and used the eraser tool to remove any of the star trails that were crossing in front of the cloud (which looked a bit wierd and didn't make a lot of sense!).

I'm not entirely happy with the end result, not really because of the startrails themselves which have come out about as well as I expected, but I think the rest of the shot isn't really exposed that well and is lacking a bit of interest. I think I'll try a more interesting subject next time I try some star trails.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers
Simon