Star trails
Although we live within a few miles of a town it is possible to see stars against a fairly dark sky. But certainly not ideal. My attempts so far are poor, not yet worthy of posting on this wonderful site. I am looking for useful tips, words of wisdom from all skilled tookapic contributors. Questions that spring to mind: Do you weight the tripod? Do you have the legs unextended? Use cable shutter release? I assume you cannot use the self timer feature? How do you stop the camera from moving? How long is long enough - hard to see on the LCD screen when it is nearly upside down and I am cold!
I am using the Olympus omd, Live Composite mode (fab), so image stabilisation is automatically turned off - I think!
Would really welcome your tips on this matter! Many thanks, and many happy shutter clicks to you all.
Tigg
tigg Thank you for your very detailed reply. I certainly had a foreground - trees, and used ISO 800 and F3.5. I think I need to improve the stability of my tripod. Thank you again.
Ian Prince I still use a Gitzo Crémaillère 2 that I bought in the ...80s. Built like a tank, weighs as much as tank! Never had to weight it down ;)
Looking forward to seeing your pics :)
tigg We are trying to find hubby's old tripod ... he has not used it all the time we have been married [nearly 24 years].
Bridget Braun Can you give some focusing tips on shooting a shot like this. I always have trouble finding a focus point, even in manual. Any tips are greatly appreciated!
tigg Try to focus in the daylight! It is certainly easier if your lens shows a distance scale.
Emily Bell As tigg says, pre-focusing your camera in daylight is an option, but then of course you can't use your camera for anything else until you take your star shots, and even then you might accidentally move the focus ring. If you have a moon, use this to manually focus, it's certainly at "infinity"! On my Canon 600D I can go to LiveView and then zoom in 10x, which really helps me know when I've got it in focus (manually!), but I'm not sure if this feature exists on all cameras (guessing not..). What I do if there's no moon is take a torch and lay it on the ground, then walk maybe 100m away (it really doesn't have to be loads) and then focus on the light of the torch.
Hope that helps! :)
Bridget Braun This is great, thanks @tigg and @emily :)
Michael McKee
One useful thing is to take a foreground shot in the fading light then exposure blend it with the night sky shot or shots. A lot of star trail shots stack several exposures.
If you can get farther from town, that will help get a darker sky. A strong wind or some rain will clean out dust an pollution to give you a clearer sky. Shoot when there's no moon. The Photographer's Ephemeris (photoephemeris dot com) will give you moonrise and set times anywhere in the world.
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Emily Bell Hi Tigg!
One of the main problems that I've had with Star trails is that while you may not notice the noise of your camera so much in just the one photo, it can really add up when you're layering them later on. So you really don't want ANY light pollution, or alternatively you don't stack too many photos.
The next thing that makes a star trail photo "work" is having a good foreground, rather than pure star trails (although that could also be quite interesting..). A building or a nicely shaped hill might do the trick.
I personally use an ISO of around 800, f/4,5 (doesn't go lower on my lens, but still works ok - if you'Ve got lower though, use it!) and a shutter speed of anything between 15 and 60 seconds, depends on where I'm shooting. I usually leave it running with the cable shutter release all night, but only actually use one hour of photos for the trails (here for example: flickr.com/photos/135923482@N0...). Through leaving the camera set up through the night I can usually be certain that I have at least one cloud-free hour. (A brilliant website for cloud-prediction and such things is clearoutside.com btw, I use them before every shoot!)
For stability I find leaving the legs of the tripod un-extended is best, and it also gets the foreground in nicely. But if you are intending to extend the legs, bean-bags are a really handy way to put weight on the cross-beams, or your tripod might even have a hook that you can hang a weight on.
Best of luck!
Emily