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Your last two images are broken.

Doing this right now. Doing a quick 15min test run to see if the light pollution is gonna be a problem. Also not many great views around the house here.



Sometimes a little light pollution isn't always the worst thing. Punched it up a bit for dramatic effect.

Yeah. Release cable or remote release cable. What's awesome about them is they have a locking device so you can shoot in Bulb mode and leave the shutter open for as long as you want. Or in terms of using the digital method in star trails the locking device allows you take pictures non-stop without touching the camera.

I'd love to get nice super wide lens and go somewhere where there is hardly any light pollution. I need to edit the main post a little bit, but overall, I am happy with it.

very nice.

when you say release chord, are you talking about a remote?

I will get to lightning soon. Day or night? I'm going to do both, but can do which ever one first. Right now I am working on photographing the Milky Way, but it is complicated. So many different techniques and I am trying to figure out what works best. Just trying to get it all written down without confusion.

Thanks for taking the time to do this! Please cover lighting. I suck at lighting.

I've got a few lined up. This one took me forever to write this morning, and some of the others are just as complicated/technical but a few others are pretty simple.

Not a cloud in the sky right now and the moon doesn't come out till really late, so I am going to try my hand at the digital method tonight for something good.

wild. more.

thanks for the info

Nice. That is pretty slick.

There probably was some wind over the whole 40 minutes, but for most of the time, thhey were probably relatively still. If you zoom in, they aren't all that sharp looking. Whats cool is if you stood there, the trees were pitch black, but after 40 minutes the camera was able to soak in all that light hitting the trees from the nearby window.

That is very cool stuff. I'll readily admit I didn't read the whole thing, as I am more interested in the pretty pictures than how you got them. How do you get the stars to move but not the trees there at the bottom? Surely there was some amount of wind that would have caused blurring in the trees.

Shot using film method
Canon 5D MkII
Shutter speed: 2404 seconds (40.07 minutes)
Aperture: f/4
ISO 100

Digital Method

This method only works on digital cameras and is the preferred method when using a digital camera.

EDIT: One important factor to mention is lens fogging. This happens particularly when it is cold outside. Because of the metal of the camera and lens, the camera can become colder than it is outside. This causes the moisture in the air around the lens to fog it up. To get around this, you can either rubber band some hand warmers around the lens or get some nice wool socks to put around the lens.

When shooting digital, you are going to do things a bit differently. This time you are going to shoot in manual and set the shutter speed to 30 seconds and switch the firing mode to burst mode. This is going to allows the camera to continuously take shots for the as long as you want. Now if you have no foreground subject, feel free to shoot at f/2.8, however, if you do have a subject, you are going to have to play with the aperture and ISO. Because each shot is only 30 seconds, you can't rely on the moon lighting to have as big of a role when shooting in bulb. This is where external light such a car can really come in handy. A second, and much more practical way about this is to have a single image exposed for your subject and use that image in photoshop to put it in your finished star trails photo. After you have obtained the proper focus and set the shutter speed, you'll have to find the right aperture/ISO mix. I'd start by picking the f/ you think you will need for your subject and then start testing for the proper ISO. A good way to go about this is to set the shutter speed to 4 seconds (exactly 3 stops down from 30 seconds) and put the ISO to 800 (exactly 3 steps up from 100 ISO). This allows you to take test shots faster. keep moving the ISO up until you find what works, and when you do, put the shutter speed back to 30 seconds and lower the ISO by 3 stops (most camera dials adjust by 1/3rd stop, so to get right ISO for 30 seconds, just lower the ISO by rotating the dial 9 times).

Everything should now be set and good to go. Shutter speed set to 30 seconds, burst mode is on, your desired aperture and the correct ISO to go along with it, and you are focused. TURN OFF AUTO FOCUS!!! This time you will not be needing the in camera noise reduction extra shot as you will be taking many short shots. Lock the shutter on the cable release and you can now shoot until the memory card is full with no worry about the batteries dying and losing your image. Of course, still make sure your batteries are charged. You don't won't them to die after a handful of shots. Next step in the process is in post.

When it comes to shooting in either RAW or jpeg, I always prefer RAW. You can perfect the white balance as well as perform many other photo disaster problems as well as making sure that every image is identical in as many ways as possible because you are going to need every image to be perfect. But RAW means larger files and if you don't have the card space, you have no choice but to use jpeg. If that's the case, make sure you set the white balance to anything but auto. Test out which white balance works best, but either tungsten or fluorescent are going to work best and the perfect the WB in post. Wether shooting in RAW or editing a jpeg, make sure you apply the changes to every image. Once the images are ready, you are going to use the star trails photoshop action which can be found at http://www.schursastrophotography.co...tartrails.html. This action will take all the images and blend them into 1 combined image with all the stars now connected into trails. Don't expect to see results immediately. The more images you have the longer it takes, so have a book handy. With the image flattened, you can then go about doing any more post you feel needs to be done.

Film Vs. Digital

The decision between which method to use is pretty simple. If you are shooting digital, use the digital method. It has few more steps and the post process is a bit longer, but you will be much happier with the results. You can also make different length trails by either using more or less of the photos. You can also use the same images as a time lapse photo of the stars actually moving across the sky which is also really cool. The film method is easier and not quite as time consuming, but you are going get a lot of noise in your image. I do suggest trying both, and when first starting out, you get to see the results sooner.

Hope this tutorial has been helpful and gets some of you to give it a try. You can really get some cool shots out of it. Let me know if there are any questions, any areas that need more work or anything that needs more explaining. Next tutorial will cover how to get detailed shots of the milky way.