I'm just wondering if anyone has had a go at star trail photos with unusual or interesting foreground objects? I photographed an illuminated water tower the other night, and it has got me looking around for large objects that might make a good foreground for a star trail shot - the only real constraint (in the southern hemisphere) is that you need to be able to face south to get the stars to have circular trails.
Very cool, guys! I have made a couple of attempts, but my problem is that my batteries seem to die so quickly, my camera shuts itself off mid-photo and then changing the battery causes too much movement to the camera. Short of buying a battery grip, any suggestions???
You can program it to have your camera take 30 second time shots for an almost unlimited amount of time. Then you stack all the images in a photo editing program.
It's better that way as opposed to a two hour shot, because if your battery goes dead during that one exposure, you've lost the entire shot. If something goes wrong using this, you've lost one shot perhaps of 100s.
@snippets@webfoot Totally agree with the intervalometer idea. My camera can't do a really long exposure without getting unreasonably noisy with purple fringing - 30 second shots with a brief pause allow for the sensor to stay cooler too.
Also, 30 second shots with stacking gives much more freedom for playing around with foreground objects.
@webfoot@pizzaboy -- Thanks guys! My last attempt I did 3-20 minute shots and my camera died about 11 minutes into the third. They were all speckled with some strange noise -- just thought my camera was capturing something that the eye can't see!?!?! I will definitely look into those -- thank you!!!
I kept the ISO down to 100, which would help with noise, but my camera takes as long to process a shot as it does to take it. That's a noise reduction quality of it too. Then when I read somewhere about a intervalometer I went out and bought one. I haven't used it yet, but am planning on using it during our camping trip this summer to Bryce Canyon in Utah.
@snippets@webfoot My trails also spanned about 20 minutes, but it was a set of 30 second shots with 10 second intervals. I actually use my Android phone as an intervalometer, but that involved making up a special cable. Allison, the speckles are definitely from the sensor heating up and getting noisy. Paul, my camera allows me to turn off long exposure noise reduction. Software such as StarTrax let you do a dark frame subtraction; you can then just take one image with the lens cap on and it can use that as the dark frame for the whole set - the image just needs to be the same shutter speed and same temperature as the rest of the set.
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You need to get an intervalometer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervalometer
You can program it to have your camera take 30 second time shots for an almost unlimited amount of time. Then you stack all the images in a photo editing program.
It's better that way as opposed to a two hour shot, because if your battery goes dead during that one exposure, you've lost the entire shot. If something goes wrong using this, you've lost one shot perhaps of 100s.
Also, 30 second shots with stacking gives much more freedom for playing around with foreground objects.
Check out the free StarStax software to easily stack the images: http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/software/software.html
I kept the ISO down to 100, which would help with noise, but my camera takes as long to process a shot as it does to take it. That's a noise reduction quality of it too. Then when I read somewhere about a intervalometer I went out and bought one. I haven't used it yet, but am planning on using it during our camping trip this summer to Bryce Canyon in Utah.