Twlight Hour – Photographing Star Trails and Static Stars

Intro­duc­tion

It’s that time in the evening, when the sun has set, the clouds have put on their show, and the first stars are begin­ning to shim­mer through the twi­light blues. It’s one of the most peace­ful and tran­quil moments of the day, sec­ond only to predawn, but you’re prob­a­bly pack­ing your bag to make sure you get back to the car before dark­ness descends. Soon the stars come out in full force, light­ing the sky with points of light stretch­ing away for many light years. Take a minute and look up, it’s a won­drous sight. If you’ve never sat deep in the wilder­ness miles from civ­i­liza­tion and sim­ply watched the light retreat from east to west and the stars dance in cir­cles around you, you’re miss­ing out.

“Rocks Rac­ing Stars” — The Race­track, Death Val­ley National Park, Cal­i­for­nia
The Tech­ni­cals: Canon 20D, 10-20mm
Expo­sure: ISO 400, f/5.6, 2.5 hours over 5x 30-minute incre­ments (my first real attempt), started soon after twilight.

Enough with the poetry. Now your ques­tion is, of course, how do I actu­ally pho­to­graph this incred­i­ble beauty? It’s likely you’ve tried, yet couldn’t quite cap­ture the color, the del­i­cate light danc­ing over the land around you, the first twin­kles of stars, and the sub­se­quent cir­cles traced out by the stars around Polaris. In this arti­cle I will share with you how to go about cap­tur­ing that magic, from the pre­con­cep­tion through to the fin­ished prod­uct. Most of this arti­cle will con­cen­trate on how to cap­ture a stun­ning star­trail pho­to­graph, though much of it is rel­e­vant to cap­tur­ing that fleet­ing moment of twi­light. This is a com­plex process involv­ing more plan­ning and tech­nique than most pho­tos, so sit tight and get ready to learn! Note: I use a Mac, so all my pho­to­shop direc­tions are for a Mac, but they’re prob­a­bly sim­i­lar for a PC.

The first step in cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful pho­to­graph is gen­er­ally some sort of pre-visualization. The beauty of star trails and pre­vi­su­al­iza­tion is that they are very pre­dictable. Even­tu­ally you will get a clear night at your desired loca­tion and you’ll know exactly what those stars will do. For “ordi­nary” golden hour pho­tog­ra­phy, get­ting the right clouds, mist, or ethe­real light requires more luck and patience to get exactly what you pic­ture in your mind. And of course once that hap­pens, it will never hap­pen quite that way again – it is unique. On every clear and calm night, how­ever, star trails will look nearly iden­ti­cal to any other day (sure the con­stel­la­tions will be in dif­fer­ent posi­tions, but for nearly every appli­ca­tion this won’t make a dif­fer­ence). As a result, a star­trail photo can eas­ily become cliché, the stars and sky will not be the unique part of your image. What will make your photo spe­cial is where you chose to take it, what the fore­ground is, and how it relates to the cir­cling heav­ens above. For myself, star trails show three things: geo­met­ri­cal shapes, motion, and the reveal­ing of an invis­i­ble force. As a result, I strive to find fore­grounds that will res­onate with those qual­i­ties, mak­ing for a final image that hope­fully speaks to you on an emo­tional and/or intel­lec­tual level.

Plan­ning and Preparation

Sup­pose you have an idea for what image you would like to cap­ture. Now how do you go about doing it? First, you’ll need to deter­mine when is the appro­pri­ate time to shoot. Yes of course, at night. Ok, do you need the moon up so that you can get light on your fore­ground? If so, what phase should it be in (ie. How much light do you need for the fore­ground?). What time do you want to start shoot­ing (ie. How much light do you want in the sky), so what time do you need the moon to rise at or set by? How high in the sky do you want the north star, if you want it in the frame (this will depend on the time of year). As you can see, there are a lot of ques­tions to be con­sid­ered, but for­tu­nately there are also some guide­lines you can fol­low. In the fol­low­ing sec­tions I’ll give my advice for where you might start.

To sum­ma­rize, you’ll need to con­sider the following:

* Loca­tion: Far away from cities! City glow can ruin the sky with weird col­ors and give you less stars.
* Time of year: Posi­tion of the stars (likely not a big fac­tor), direc­tion of the twi­light glow.
* Moon phase: The two or three days around full moon will give you a lot of light, and less stars.
* Moon­rise times: The full moon rises roughly at sun­set.
* Sunset/sunrise times: This will deter­mine when you can start shoot­ing. More specif­i­cally, civil twi­light times are about an hour after sun­set.
* Weather pre­dic­tions: You’ll want a clear night, but some clouds can add a nice ethe­real char­ac­ter to your image.

The very first step in cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful twi­light or star-trail image is prepa­ra­tion. You might be leav­ing your home, car, or tent in the last hour of light, but you’ll be return­ing long after dark. At the very least, you should make sure you have a way to return safely!

* Know the way back to the car! I highly rec­om­mend a GPS for this, as it can be use­ful in tag­ging your tri­pod as well, in case you want to leave and come back later. A com­pass and topo map will help in more remote areas.
* Head­lamp. It’s going to get dark, and you bet­ter have a light an extra bat­ter­ies.
* Warm clothes. As the night sets in, it can get chilly very fast! Bring a warm jacket, hat, and gloves if it’s that time of year.
* Food and water. If you’re headed out for a 3 hour expo­sure, you’ll want some­thing to drink and nib­ble on.
* Some­thing to do. Often I am con­tent to just sit there and stare at the heav­ens, but you might want a book or some music to pass the time.
* A pad to sit on. The ground gets cold, and you’ll likely be want­ing to take a seat. Bring­ing a foam pad to sit or lie down on will make you much more com­fort­able. Con­sider bring­ing a sleep­ing bag and set­tling in for a few hours while your cam­era is tak­ing the picture.

The pho­tog­ra­phy equipment:

* Your cam­era.
* A pro­gram­ma­ble remote (for Canon the TC-80N3).
* Bub­ble level.
* Com­pass and dec­li­na­tion (found on topo maps of the area).
* Sturdy Tri­pod and per­haps some­thing to weigh it down.
* Rocket blower (this can be help­ful if dew starts to set­tle on the lens, blow on it with the rocket blower occa­sion­ally and this will reduce the effect).
* Lens hood (again, for dew pro­tec­tion).
* Extra bat­ter­ies (or exter­nal power source, a cam­era grip with the extra bat­tery would be a good idea if you’ve got one).

Col­lect­ing Starlight – the Exposure

There are a lot of vari­ables here and I sug­gest you try a few things before you set­tle on some­thing. Essen­tially there are two val­ues that set the expo­sure: ISO rat­ing and aper­ture. The shut­ter speed will pri­mar­ily deter­mine how long your star trails are and if you do have a fore­ground in the frame, it will affect the expo­sure of that. For dif­fer­ent cam­eras, you may find dif­fer­ent results, but I have found that for dark (moon­less) nights, iso 400 and f/5.6 seem to be ideal for most applications.

If the moon is in the sky, the expo­sure can dra­mat­i­cally change and your fore­ground will be get­ting a lot more light. In this case, the expo­sure time will be impor­tant. For a full moon night, ISO 400 f/5.6 and 5 min­utes should still be in roughly the right range.

One of the biggest dis­ap­point­ments of many star trails images I have seen (sec­ond to the lack of an inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion) is that the trails are sim­ply not long enough. The stars either need to be frozen, or they need to be long enough to com­pli­ment the com­po­si­tion, oth­er­wise the sky just looks messy. The longer the lens, the shorter your expo­sure needs to be because the rel­a­tive motion of the star is longer. Also, the length of the trails depend on the dis­tance from Polaris. Polaris hardly moves at all and the same goes for nearby stars. Through per­sonal expe­ri­ence I have found that for ultra-wide angles, 15-20mm (on a full frame SLR) and includ­ing the full cir­cle around Polaris, you need a min­i­mum of about 2–3 hours to get a suc­cess­ful image, the longer the better.

The Light – It’s All About Timing

While the stars are bright­est in the mid­dle of the night with no moon, the rest of the land­scape, includ­ing the sky, looks a lot bet­ter when there’s still some light out so you can see and pho­to­graph it. I have found that by start­ing the expo­sure dur­ing twi­light, when there is still some glow from the recently set sun results in a nice deep blue sky, a pleas­ing gra­di­ent, and just enough light on the fore­ground, depend­ing on what you’re shoot­ing. Of course bright fore­grounds will be eas­ier to expose for. As I will explain later, my pre­ferred expo­sure is ISO 400, f/5.6 for 5 min­utes with a sequence of 20–30 expo­sures lay­ered in Pho­to­shop. As soon as I find that the set­ting results in no blown high­lights, I start col­lect­ing light. It would also be good to note that air traf­fic is least in the early morn­ing (1–3 am or so), so if you’re hav­ing trou­ble with planes, that might become a factor.

“Geom­e­try of Motion” — Bad­wa­ter Salt Flats, Death Val­ley National Park, Cal­i­for­nia
The Tech­ni­cals: Canon 5D, Sigma 15mm f/2.8 fish­eye (with some dis­tor­tion cor­rec­tion)
Expo­sure: ISO 400, f/5.6, 32x 5-minute expo­sures blended, started at twilight.

Alter­na­tively, you can time your expo­sure so that at some point, the moon casts light on the fore­ground. The more moon, how­ever, the less stars will be recorded. Fur­ther­more, if the moon is high in the sky, your image will end up look­ing like an oddly warm day­light scene with stars. I have never had the chance to time a twi­light image to moon­rise, but I imag­ine that could be quite suc­cess­ful. Another option is to “light­paint” – using a flash­light (or flash) to light up the fore­ground dur­ing the expo­sure. Get­ting this tech­nique right takes prac­tice, but you can get some neat effects. For a nat­ural look, I rec­om­mend using an LED light, as the blueish white bal­ance works bet­ter with the night sky than the yel­low tint from an incan­des­cent bulb in many cases (of course, it depends on your sky).

“Essence of Time” — Bristle­cone National For­est
The Tech­ni­cals: Canon 5D, 17-40mm, LED head­lamp
Expo­sure: ISO 400, f/5.6, about 25x 5-minute expo­sures, started at twi­light
Light­paint­ing: In the last expo­sure I used ISO 800 and used my head­lamp to paint the tree from the side.

Set­ting Up The Shot – Find­ing the North Star

So if you’re fol­low­ing my advice, you’re set­ting up your shot while it’s still light out so you can get the opti­mal com­po­si­tion, but you can’t see the stars yet! Of course, if it’s dark and you can see the stars, then you can’t see the land very well, so get­ting a nice com­po­si­tion will be dif­fi­cult. The hard­est ones to set up are those that includ­ing the north star, Polaris, in the frame. Com­po­si­tions tend to work best with Polaris in the mid­dle and not too high up in the pic­ture you so get com­plete cir­cles around Polaris.

So how do you get Polaris in the right spot? That’s where your com­pass and map come into play. You need to point your cam­era to true north. The com­pass, how­ever, points to mag­netic north, which lies in North­ern Canada near Ellesmere Island. The dec­li­na­tion, found on your topo map, will tell you the dif­fer­ence in angle between true north and mag­netic north. Using this and your com­pass, you can find true north. Then you can point your cam­era in that direc­tion and find your­self a nice com­po­si­tion (before it’s dark). As soon as the stars start to twin­kle, you’ve got to work fast. You want to double-check your com­po­si­tion before com­mit­ting 3 hours to it. So shoot a test shot of about 5 min­utes (depend­ing on the focal length), just long enough so you can see some rota­tion. This will help you find the north star, and just to dou­ble check it’s posi­tion, hope­fully you’re not far off. It can be use­ful to note that if you can find the big dip­per, the two stars mark­ing the end of the dip­per point to Polaris, and the last two stars in the lit­tle dipper’s han­dle point to it as well. Know­ing where it is in the sky comes with prac­tice, or you can look it up in some star charts to play it safe. Sky and Tele­scope has access to free star charts online if you reg­is­ter with them.

Shoot­ing The Twilight

As I men­tioned ear­lier in the arti­cle, star trails can get cliché very quickly. But for­tu­nately, you have an alter­na­tive – to pho­to­graph sta­tic stars with twi­light or moon­light. For twi­light images, I like to take an expo­sure dur­ing the last glow of pink in the sky and then come back an hour later when the stars are out in full force. Then I will take another expo­sure. Then after return­ing home I’ll put the two images in a stack in pho­to­shop, and use a lighten blend mode to bring out the stars. Due to the incred­i­ble dynamic range at this hour, you will likely need to take three exposures.

“Cos­mic Patio” — Lupines in the King’s River Canyon, Cal­i­for­nia
The Tech­ni­cals: Canon 5DmkII, 16-35mm mkII @ 23mm, tri­pod
Expo­sure 1: ISO 400, f/16, 1.5 min­utes (foreground/hills)
Expo­sure 2: ISO 1600, f/16, 30 sec­onds (sky, 30 min­utes later)
Expo­sure 3: ISO 3200, f/2.8, 15 sec­onds (stars, another 30 min­utes later)

Rec­om­mend Exposures

* Fore­ground: Pho­to­graph the fore­ground shortly after twi­light, some­thing like iso 400, f/16 at 30 sec­onds to sev­eral min­utes.
* Sky: Take this expo­sure when there is still some nice gra­di­ent and color in the sky, but before the stars are com­pletely out. I like shoot­ing into the sun­set so that I get a slightly pink gra­di­ent in the pic­ture.
* Stars: Use your widest aper­ture (this is a good excuse to buy an f/2.8 lens) and an ISO of around 1600–6400. On mod­ern cam­eras I rec­om­mend 3200 at a min­i­mum. Depend­ing on the focal length, you will need to use an expo­sure time of 10–15 sec, 30 sec at the absolute longest on a super wide angle, to freeze the stars. Don’t for­get to take off the polar­izer if you tend to leave it on!

Again, any­one can pho­to­graph stars, so I urge you to take the time to find a com­po­si­tion that truly works under the twi­light light. When shoot­ing with a wide angle, the stars can often become tiny and insignif­i­cant. One easy solu­tion is to pho­to­graph them slightly out of focus. This will make them appear larger and a lit­tle fuzzy, as seen below. Another trick is to use a method of increas­ing the ‘glow’ or lumi­nos­ity of the stars. To do this in Pho­to­shop, flat­ten your image, dupli­cate it, set the blend mode (located above the lay­ers palate) to “lighten”, and apply a light Gauss­ian blur of 5–40 pix­els, depend­ing on the res­o­lu­tion. Restrict this glow effect to the stars, and turn the opac­ity to taste.

“Twi­light Blues” — Mt. Rainier National Park, Wash­ing­ton
The Tech­ni­cals: Canon 5D, 17-40mm
Expo­sure: 4 expo­sure blend:
1. (For the fore­ground) ISO 400, f/11, 2 min­utes
2. (For the moun­tain) ISO 400, f/11, 2 min­utes, shifted focus from the fore­ground expo­sure
3. (For the sky) ISO 400, f/11, 25 sec
4. (For the stars) ISO 1600, f/4, 15 sec, shot 1 hour after the pre­vi­ous three
Pro­cess­ing: first 3 lay­ers blended nor­mally, last layer in “lighten” mode. Due to the poor qual­ity of the stars, I went in and man­u­ally retouched the stars with a paint­brush to make them look pretty. A faster lens (like an f/2.8) and the high ISO (3200–6400) of mod­ern dig­i­tal SLR’s make it much eas­ier to get high qual­ity stars.

Tak­ing the Pic­ture – Star Trail Techniques

Pho­tograph­ing star trails with a dig­i­tal SLR is a much more involved expe­ri­ence than it was with film. With film you could sim­ply flip up the mir­ror, go to bed, and come back a few hours later and you’d have your­self a photo (after mak­ing sure of the sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset, and pick­ing a clear moon­less night of course). With dig­i­tal, how­ever, there are some addi­tional hoops to jump through. So why use dig­i­tal at all? With film there were prob­lems with reci­procity, mean­ing the films sen­si­tiv­ity to var­i­ous kinds of light changes with longer expo­sures, and it can be hard to pre­dict unless you know your film well. Also due to the lim­ited dynamic range, get­ting some light on the fore­ground is a much more chal­leng­ing propo­si­tion. But for really long expo­sures, dig­i­tal might make your life a lot eas­ier (it is inter­est­ing to note that cam­eras such as the Canon EOS 620 do not expend bat­tery power to keep the mir­ror up, while most other cam­eras do).

Noise is the num­ber one enemy you will encounter. Once you start to push your expo­sure beyond a few min­utes, the noise starts to increase sig­nif­i­cantly. We call this long expo­sure noise. Also, dif­fer­ent parts of the cam­era will heat up and affect how the sen­sor works. Most (if not all) cam­eras will exhibit some kind of magenta col­ored bloom in a con­sis­tent spot (dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent cam­eras). There are a num­ber of solu­tions to consider.

As the tem­per­a­ture drops, the sig­nal to noise ratio gets bet­ter, and your noise will decrease. So if it’s –15 degrees F out­side, you might very well get away with a 2-hour straight expo­sure with­out much noise! But it’s not that usu­ally cold (thank­fully!). So for those warm nights you have two other options: long expo­sure noise reduc­tion (avail­able in most cam­eras, or it can be done man­u­ally using dark frames), or tak­ing mul­ti­ple expo­sures and stack­ing them (or a com­bi­na­tion of both). I have not found the long expo­sure noise reduc­tion to be very effec­tive at all, so I turn it off and use multi-exposure stacking.

Shoot­ing Mul­ti­ple Exposures

The idea here is to sequen­tially shoot lots of shorter expo­sures. The length of each indi­vid­ual expo­sure will depend on the trade­off between noise and pro­cess­ing time/power required to assem­ble your final image. I find 5 min­utes to be a nice num­ber (so for a 2-hour expo­sure you’ll need 24 expo­sures). For most cam­eras, any­thing beyond 30 sec­onds needs to be done through the ‘bulb’ com­mand. If you plan on try­ing this, I rec­om­mend get­ting a remote for you cam­era that lets you pro­gram such com­mands so you don’t have to man­u­ally sit there and press the shut­ter (for Canon that would be the TC-80N3). For the TC-80N3 you’ll need to set the time between expo­sures to 1 sec­ond (it doesn’t shoot mul­ti­ple expo­sures if you leave it at zero).Turn off long expo­sure noise reduc­tion and mir­ror lock up. You want as seam­less a series of images as you can get for star trails.

I should note here that bat­ter­ies don’t last for­ever. Your bat­tery might only last for an hour or two at the most. Using a bat­tery grip or exter­nal power sup­ply from some­where like www.digitalcamerabattery.com might be a good idea. Oth­er­wise you have to be really quick with replac­ing a dead one (it’s pos­si­ble, I’ve taken that approach quite often)! Cold tem­per­a­tures will reduce their efficiency.

Pro­cess­ing and Stack­ing Mul­ti­ple Exposures

When pro­cess­ing your raw files, be sure to have the set­tings the same for each file. In par­tic­u­lar, choose a white bal­ance set­ting that makes the twi­light exposure(s) look right, then use that same set­ting for all your con­ver­sions. If you’re shoot­ing jpeg, you should prob­a­bly select a man­ual white bal­ance in cam­era so that they all end up the same.

Now you have a set of 20–30 expo­sures all shot and processed using the same set­tings, but you need to assem­ble them into one image. This is where things get com­pli­cated and atten­tion to detail is impor­tant if you’re inter­ested in the high­est qual­ity. The sim­plest method is to open all your files in pho­to­shop and stack them in “lighten” blend mode (the blend mode is located as a drop down menu in the lay­ers palate). There is an easy way to do this if you have CS3 or higher:

1. Process your raw files (or jpegs), and save them to a folder.
2. Open Pho­to­shop.
3. Nav­i­gate to File-Scripts-Load files into stack.
4. Select the files you wish to merge and select “Cre­ate smart object after load­ing lay­ers.“
5. Then go to layers-smart objects-stack mode-maximum.
6. To get rid of the smart object and get a reg­u­lar layer, you can then flat­ten the final image.

Essen­tially for each pixel in the image, pho­to­shop will choose the bright­est pixel of all the lay­ers in the stack. Since the stars are the only things chang­ing (usu­ally), this will sim­ply draw out your star trails. But now if you zoom in to 100% you will see gaps, like this:

Star trails using the lighten blend mode method.
32x 5-minute expo­sures taken at ISO 400, f/5.6, with the Canon 5D and Sigma 15mm f/2.8 fish­eye lens, stacked using lighten blend mode.

After you resize to a nor­mal web size (800 or so pix­els in the longest dimen­sion) you won’t really notice the gaps, but in a nice print you will. You could sit there and use the clone tool to fix every gap, but if you have 25 expo­sures and 100 bright stars, that’s already 2,500 clone fixes – not some­thing you want to do. There is one other pos­si­bil­ity that some­times works (only if you shot the cir­cu­lar pat­tern of the stars rotat­ing around Polaris). This approach, how­ever, only works if there is hardly any dis­tor­tion in the pic­ture, which doesn’t really hap­pen with wide angles. It’s also really hard to get the cen­ter of rota­tion just right.

1. Dupli­cate your flat­tened image.
2. On the dupli­cate image, select the entire image with the crop tool.
3. Move the cen­ter of the crop box (there is a lit­tle cross hairs) to the cen­ter of rota­tion of your star trails. Choose this very care­fully.
4. Move your mouse to one of the cor­ners, and rotate the image just a lit­tle.
5. Select this image, and paste it on top of the orig­i­nal 6. Set the blend mode (located in the lay­ers palate) to “lighten.“
7. Crop a lit­tle or use the clone tool or layer masks to get rid of the white edges in the corners.

Lighten Screen Blend­ing (LSB) – Advanced Multi-exposure blending

Naively you might think that those gaps are there because of the slight break in time between expo­sures. For a long lens you might be right, but for an ultra wide angle, one sec­ond is insignif­i­cant. The gaps are there because of the blend mode. If you try using the “screen” blend mode the gaps dis­ap­pear! But, then the sky becomes much too bright, so the key is to use a clever com­bi­na­tion of the two.

This method over­comes many of the short­com­ings of just using “lighten” lay­ers. This works best if you shoot raw. First, lower the expo­sure by 1-stop (alter­na­tively you can do this in Pho­to­shop after you’re done). When doing your raw con­ver­sion use a “lin­ear” con­ver­sion. That means you will do no curves, lev­els, or con­trast adjust­ments in your raw con­ver­sion (for ACR set all the val­ues except white bal­ance and saturation/vibrance to zero, make sure to set the tone curve to lin­ear as well). This will make the image look very low in con­trast, and you prob­a­bly will not like the result. We will fix that later but for now, using a lin­ear con­ver­sion is crit­i­cal, oth­er­wise you will be affect­ing each end of the star trail, mak­ing the gaps more pro­nounced. Save the files as Tiff or psd in a new folder.

Load your files into a stack (using file-scripts-load files into stack), but do NOT con­vert them to a smart object. Now you are going to per­form a lit­tle algo­rithm, alter­nat­ing the use of screen and lighten lay­ers strate­gi­cally to get rid of those lit­tle gaps.

Now sup­pose you have the fol­low­ing layers:

Layer-1 (the back­ground layer), Layer-2, Layer-3, Layer-4 (the top layer in the stack)

You want to dupli­cate each layer, except for the first and last:

Layer-1, Layer-2, Layer-2-copy, Layer-3, Layer-3-copy, Layer-4

Now set layer-2 to blend mode “screen” — select it and layer-1 and merge them (select both and hit com­mand + e, or go to layers-merge lay­ers). This is why we reduced the expo­sure ear­lier, because now you’re essen­tially adding expo­sures. Set this new layer to ‘lighten’ blend mode. Now do the same for each suc­ces­sive pair,so set layer-3 to blend mode screen, and merge it with layer-2-copy, then set the new layer to lighten.

After doing this for all your lay­ers, you will end up with a stack of lay­ers all set to ‘lighten’ blend mode, and by strate­gi­cally using the screen blend mode we have made sure each gap is filled in. The image will appear flat­ter than you likely would want it to be (that’s because we used a lin­ear con­ver­sion on the raw files). Now flat­ten the image and go ahead and do your nor­mal pro­cess­ing, using curves, lev­els, etc. to bring the con­trast back to the desired lev­els. If done prop­erly, you should get some­thing like this:

Star trails using the Lighten-Screen-Blend (LSB) algo­rithm.
Same files as before, processed at –1 expo­sure in raw and blended using the LSB method. No fur­ther adjust­ments are need­ded. There are still some odd vari­a­tions in the stars, which I can­not explain. The two main gaps you do see are because I had to replace my bat­tery, twice, that’s why I sug­gest you get an exter­nal power supply.

If you could have a low noise 2–3 hour expo­sure (ie. on a very cold night, or some time in the future with bet­ter cam­eras), you’d be bet­ter off doing that, why waste your time pro­cess­ing? But for the time being, and under most con­di­tions, this will likely be your best bet.

A Note on Dark Frames

If you want to get into astropho­tog­ra­phy, I rec­om­mend you do some more research and read a book. There are many tech­niques that are much bet­ter for get­ting detailed images of stars (not star trails), includ­ing the use of dark frames. I have not found dark frames to be use­ful with my cam­eras and tech­niques with the twi­light hour (where only the bright­est of stars come through), but you might find them use­ful – I rec­om­mend you do a search on Google.

In Sum­mary

1. Plan and pre­pare: Con­sider loca­tion, time of year, sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset, moon phase, etc. and how each of these might affect your pro­posed image.
2. Before you head out the door: Have a safe way back to the car and be pre­pared for spend­ing some time alone in the cold and dark. Bring a head­lamp, GPS, warm clothes, food, water, and some­thing do.
3. Com­pose your shot early: Don’t wait until the stars are out or you will miss the best light. Bring a com­pass to help you find the north star and take a test shot.
4. Expo­sure: I rec­om­mend try­ing mul­ti­ple expo­sures, each of ISO 400, f/5.6, 5 min­utes. Use a pro­gram­ma­ble remote to make your life eas­ier. Remem­ber: it’s not just the star trails you’re expos­ing for, but also the fore­ground and sky. I rec­om­mend start­ing soon after the first stars start to appear, and use a moon­less night unless you want to lighten up the fore­ground more (in that case shoot around moonrise/set).
5. Mul­ti­ple Expo­sure Tech­nique: Use a pro­gram­ma­ble remote (for canon the TC-80N3), set your time between expo­sure to the min­i­mum (1 sec­ond), and turn off long expo­sure noise reduc­tion and do not use mir­ror lock up.
6. Sta­tic Stars and Twi­light: I rec­om­mend tak­ing three expo­sures, one for the fore­ground at twi­light, one for the gra­di­ent in the sky (half an hour later or so), and one for the stars (another half hour to an hour later).
7. Power con­straints: Most bat­ter­ies don’t last as long as you might want to shoot for. Depend­ing on the tem­per­a­ture, your bat­tery might only last about an hour. Use a bat­tery grip or exter­nal sup­ply to make your life eas­ier or be really quick in replac­ing a dead bat­tery!
8. Pro­cess­ing: For an easy solu­tion stack every­thing in “lighten” blend mode. For high qual­ity results, use the LSB algo­rithm described above.

Floris van Breugel is a Pasadena based nature pho­tog­ra­pher with a pas­sion for any­thing from birds to des­o­late deserts and high moun­tain peaks. He was born and raised in California’s Bay Area, and he spent much of his child­hood explor­ing the Cal­i­for­nia land­scape from the Sier­ras to the South­ern Deserts with his par­ents. His inter­est in art started with paint­ing, which has greatly influ­enced his cur­rent pho­to­graphic style of ele­gant sim­plic­ity. He bought his first first dig­i­tal SLR, the Canon 20D, in 2006 to pho­to­graph birds. Since then he has expanded his pho­to­graphic vision to include the entire nat­ural world. Floris work can be viewed here on his per­sonal web­site

This arti­cle is repro­duced with writ­ten con­sent from Floris van Breugel and all text and images are copy­righted to Floris van Breugel Photography.

Tags: floris van breugel, night photography, star trail article