Monthly Archives: October 2013

ShutterXpose organised Star Trail Photography and Steel Wool painting (one of the spectacular form of light painting) workshop for it’s members. The weather was perfect and we planned for a long stay at the desert followed by finger licking BBQ dinner arranged by our members. The whole experience was quite successful and lived upto its expectation.

In this post, I would discuss on Star Trail Photography. I plan to post on Steel Wool photography soon.

Photographing a Star Trail is highly rewarding as well a challenge, but with bit of patience the whole experience would be fascinating. The challenge here is you don’t know exactly what the photograph will look especially if you are an amateur and have no previous experience shooting in the dark.  The streaks of light which you see in the image here is the light left behind on the sensor from the stars as it travels across the sky with a camera on long exposure. The images which you capture are stationary stars and the rotation of the earth that makes them spin.

If you are planning for star trail photography, you need to find a place typically at the outskirts of the city, so as to be away from the city lights and smoke pollution. Check the calendar to find a day with a moonless night, you can use several smartphone apps like Moon Free or Moon Calendar to help you around.

There are two different approaches to do Star Trail Photography.

One method is to have a single shot, where you mount the camera on a Tripod, compose the shot, dial the shutter to the Bulb mode and keep the shutter open for almost an hour so that the stars create a trail as the earth rotates on its own axis. However the biggest concern is the digital noise due to high ISO and certain cases sensor heat-up in lower end camera models.

The second method is to take multiple frames and “Stack” them later using computer application, which is my preferred method.

Mount the camera on a sturdy tripod, compose the shot, dial the shutter to 20-30 second duration and capture as many as 100 or 150 or even more frames by using a Remote Shutter Release cable so as to avoid any shake, if you have a Mirror-up option in the camera you may use this option so as to capture almost sharp images. Shooting short exposures means less noise, you can shoot with a wide aperture and a faster ISO so that you will be able to capture more stars than the previous method. It is advisable to know the limitation of your camera to handle noise.

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