{"id":8309,"date":"2015-03-09T18:18:29","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T07:18:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alexwisephotography.net\/blog\/?p=8309"},"modified":"2015-03-09T18:19:43","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T07:19:43","slug":"before-and-after-wye-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alexwisephotography.net\/blog\/2015\/03\/09\/before-and-after-wye-river\/","title":{"rendered":"Before and After – Wye River"},"content":{"rendered":"

[twentytwenty]\"wye-river-before\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"wye-river-after\"<\/a>
\n[\/twentytwenty]<\/p>\n

Photographing star trails is something that is forever on my to do list. I\u2019ve photographed countless sunrise and sunsets over the years but star trails continue to elude me. On a trip down the Great Ocean Road<\/a> for a few days, I was determined to pick a night and setup for some star trails. My intention was to find a reasonable composition, a rock to sit on, load my tablet up with an episode\u00a0of The Newsroom (great show I might add) and sat\u00a0back while the camera did the rest.<\/p>\n

Taking the Photos<\/h2>\n

Luckily conditions were perfect for star trails with the sky being clear and the moon relatively new. When photographing star trails, those much smarter than I suggest it is better to time your star trail photography around the time of the new moon. This results in less light emitted by the moon allowing for a darker sky. Another thing that has to be considered when doing star trail photography is light pollution. This can be a real issue if you live in bigger cities. I\u2019m from Melbourne, Australia, often we will drive 100km ~ from the city, and still struggle some light pollution that leaves some light visible in the sky. This does not make photographing stars impossible but is something to consider if you do live in a bigger city. Fortunately, for this trip, we were headed far from Melbourne with minimal light pollution so it was clear and very dark skies.\u00a0 This led to some great conditions for star trails even if I still got some noise pollution through an\u00a0orange glow from Geelong in the left of the frame.<\/p>\n

One thing that has always acted as a deterrent for star trail photography is sitting around in the dark for hours on end while your camera exposes the earth moving on its natural axis (thanks wiki!<\/a>).\u00a0<\/strong>This time around I decided to come a bit better pre-planned and loaded up my tablet with episodes of The Newsroom and made myself at home while my camera exposed for 2 hours. I must admit, I love being in nature on my own but not so much when it\u2019s pitch black dark. Let\u2019s just say \u2013 I was happy when the exposure was over so I could get home and jump into a warm bed \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Using the pilons as my key composition, I arrived at the location around sunset with the intention of taking a photo on blue hour to capture an image while there was still a lot of light in the scene. The idea here was to get a good dynamic range shot of the pilons in case later during the night, it got too dark and difficult to get a good exposure.<\/p>\n

Rather than capture one 80 minute long exposure I decided to take 8 x 10 minute exposures to minimise noise in my image. Unfortunately the 5D Mark II isn’t fantastic in the dark when it comes to noise so opting to blend exposures is a nifty and cheeky way of avoiding this. \u00a0The end result was\u00a08 x 10 minute exposures at F\/5 and ISO 100. \u00a0This was made possible by using an\u00a0intervalometer\u00a0where I specified the exposure time, interval between photos and how many photos I was taking. Other than occasionally glancing at the LCD screen to see how the exposures were looking, I then sat back and enjoyed an episode of The Newsroom until the camera finished doing its thing.<\/p>\n

Post Processing the Photos<\/h2>\n

Blending multiple star trail photos is made easy through the Lighten layer mode in Photoshop. I simply loaded my blue hour image up and then added the 8 images as layers. With these open, I changed the layer mode to\u00a0Lighten<\/strong> which then combined the star trails and created some nice lines. \u00a0In case you’re\u00a0still a little bit still confused I’ve put together a quick clip which demonstrates the process. It’s really that easy.<\/p>\n\n

With the images blended I then went about post processing\u00a0which I’ve put together into a headache inducing timelapse video. You might notice that I do a lot of flicking back and forward during the video? This isn’t the original edit of the photo and I’m simply checking back to the original during the edit to check how my edit fared in comparison to the original edit.<\/p>\n\n

Through the mad scramble of the above clip I made the following changes:<\/p>\n