![]() It requires more time in front of the computer. You’ll need to use either your camera’s built-in intervalometer or purchase a separate corded or cordless intervalometer. In fact, you could even shoot different takes on your light painting and mask in your favorite. It can be easier to incorporate light painting into your image without the worry of ruining your entire shot. It’s easier to remove unwanted lights from any individual frame, or to mask in just one clean foreground. (In fact, you can’t even use it, because turning on the feature would create gaps in your star trails in the final stacked image.) Cars could illuminate parts of the landscape you preferred to be dark. Someone could walk through your scene with a flashlight. With one long exposure you risk having your image ruined by any number of lighting mishaps. You may not always be able to shoot long exposures when there is a lot of moonlight or artificial illumination, because all that light can blow out your exposure. Setting your camera to shoot an hourlong exposure renders your camera unusable for anything else for 2 hours! The problem is that this setting renders most cameras unusable for twice the exposure time. This is the feature that we turn on when shooting very long exposures (i.e., more than a few minutes). You’ll need to use Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR). Turn off the cable release when the time is up. Simply plug in a cable release, set your camera to Bulb, press and lock your cable release, and mark your watch. No fussing with a complicated intervalometer. No need for post-processing to create the star trails. The latter involves more post-production work, so why would we choose that? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each method: One Long Exposure There are two primary methods of creating star trails: capturing one long exposure or capturing many short exposures and stacking them together in Photoshop or other similar programs. In this first post I’ll discuss how to shoot for star stacking, in the next post I’ll cover how to process the images, and then in a third post I’ll teach how to rid your stacks of plane trails and other artifacts of the process. In a series of blog posts that starts today, I’ll show you how to create star trails by using a special technique that works around those potential problems: star stacking. ![]() Yet, shooting star trails is rife with potential obstacles, from camera limitations to stray light and more. ![]() Star trail photos are fun to shoot, and they bend reality by dilating time in a way that humans can’t otherwise perceive. We can illuminate the foreground to give the sky a sense of place, use filters to give the stars a fantasy look or use longer exposure times to render the stars as trails across the sky. The night sky can be captured with a stunning Milky Way core, or as a deep sea of stars that register as thousands of points of light. Night photographers are fortunate to have many ways to interpret a subject. ![]()
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