Mt Wellington Star Trails
Posted by Alex Wise on January 31, 2010
Recently I met up with Carl Ashley who was in Hobart with his dad, both are mad about photography. It was really nice to shoot with them as they’re great guys and also very knowledgeable about photography.
This is a 50 minute exposure of star trails captured after sunset on Mt. Wellington, Tasmania. To minimise noise, I shot 5 x 10 minute exposures and later combined them in Photoshop. I find the best way to do this is through opening one image and adding the remaining 4 images as layers. From here simply set the layer type as ‘lighten’ and it should line up nicely. It probably would have been better if I shot much shorter exposures (30 seconds) to further minimise noise but the final image is clean enough for me. For those that don’t own Photoshop, Achim Schaller has developed a program which does similar to what I explained (click).
The rocks were briefly light painted in one of the 5 exposures.
Bookmark the permalink , unfortunately trackbacks are closed.
3 Comments
By Beau on January 31, 2010 @ 8:59 pmPermalink
Very cool, mate. I’ve tried shooting star trails like this a couple of times. I left my shutter open for one long exposure though and it came out really noisy. I might have to experiment with the process you mentioned. Cheers.
By carl on January 31, 2010 @ 9:43 pmPermalink
Wow! Super psyched by how that turned out – hope to get my film developed tomorrow!
Thanks for the fun night – won’t be forgetting the -2.6d wind chill for a while!
By Andrew Skegg on January 31, 2010 @ 10:23 pmPermalink
Great photo Alex!
One Trackback
[...] last photos from this set were originally inspired by this amazing photo from Alex Wise, though my exposures were shorter because there were lots of people walking around [...]