Star Trail's

[John Mc]

I'm going to give it a shot tonight as the sky's will be clear.
Any tip's? and does it mater what lens i use? only got an 18-55mm kit lens and a 50mm/1.8.

Cheers for any help

John

 

[Bram]

Good call, I wish we had some clear-er skies here. Anywhoo, I would use the 18-55 because it's slower, therefore longer exposure I would think, mount it to the tripod and set your exposure. I'm sure you're aware of the longer the exposure the longer the trails. I have personally never done this, the longest exposure I ever did was only 15 minutes so.
Hope this helps a bit.

 

[John Mc]

Yeah,i was going to set the lens to f16 and do 3 or four shots at 15,20,30 and 40 minutes. im going to focus on a shed,as im going to probably focus on a castle once i figure how long im going to expose for.

 

[Bram]

Good call. I havn't figured out how to go past the 15 minute mark lol. I'm thinking focus is going to be the hardest thing.

 

[John Mc]

Cable release?im taping down the shutter button,i dont have one nor the money must improvise. Im going to use a Torch,focus,and turn the lens to manual, Then tape the shutter down

 

[Bram]

AAAhhhhhhhhh smart lol, I have a remote the only issue with it is: There's a setting for me where I can open the shutter and if I don't hit it again it will close automatically after 15 minutes.

 

[Trever1t]

Why not set focus to manual and infinity? As far as exposure, I think you might need some ND filters, even 5 minutes in the dark at ISO100 gives me too much exposure. Please post up your methods and results, this is something I haven't got down yet myself.

 

[Boomn4x4]

Also make sure you turn on noise reduction in your camera settings. Long exposures, more so with some cameras than others, can lead to the image sensor heating up causing some ghosting effects called Amp Glow. On my D40, I get a purple haze along the borders on shots longer than 10 mintues. Sounds like Nikons have more problems with it than Canon.

The noise reduction takes a second exposure with the shutter closed and alows the image sensor to heat up without any external light. The camera software is able to take the data from the second exposure and erase it from the original image. When you do this, you will want to make sure your batter is fully charged, because if you take a 40 mintue exposure, the camera will take a second 40 mintue exposure resulting in a total shot of 80 mintues.... that is going to put a pretty big drain on your camera.

 

[Derosa]

Maybe I missed something because of my inexperience, but how will you remove the tape from the shutter without disturbing the camera and, thus, the image? Edit: Maybe you are taping the shutter on the cable release...missed that.

 

[benlonghair]

I did some long exposures at the beach this past summer. My D60 had such terrible noise by 3 minutes into the exposure that I decided it really wasn't worth it.

Think I'm going to buy some film and a wide lens and set up my old SRT201 for the night.

 

[John Mc]

Maybe I missed something because of my inexperience, but how will you remove the tape from the shutter without disturbing the camera and, thus, the image? Edit: Maybe you are taping the shutter on the cable release...missed that.

I thought of that earlier,so i tried it,but if i turn off the camera it saves without disturbing the image. and the images arent bad from earlier.

Im using a Nd8 filter too,i thought about this too.
and like i said,its an experiment for me just now,so i'll use noise reduction at a later time

 

[Trever1t]

good, make sure you post up the results and exposure info and I am really interested in trying this myself. On my first attempt I drove 2 hours to the top of a mountain but was chased off by police as the observatory is closed at night.

This was the best I could get in the 5 minutes I had. This was a 30 second exposure in almost no light, no noise reduction.


Lick Observatory by Trever1t, on Flickr


I definitely need some good ND filters.

 

[Bram]

Wicked plain trails on the lower left handside.

 

[Trever1t]

Wicked plain trails on the lower left handside.

yeah, alternating red/white.

 

[Bram]

Yeah! How'd you get the observatory so nicely litt?