I spent a great weekend out in the wilderness a couple weeks back; a guy’s weekend, a weekend away from the computer, away from Internet, the iPhone, and even the shower (yikes). It was a great weekend!

The elk rut was heating up and I ended up with some nice shots of a wide array of wildlife, insects and other creatures.

One thing I've wanted to try for a while now is Star-trails. I've seen some great examples of star trail photography and I really wanted to get my feet wet and give it a go.

My First Attempt
Our first night at camp I set up a 10 minute exposure and ended up with a wonderful photo of pure black nothingness… in other words it was a flop.

I would love share the shutter speed settings with you but in my haste and disappointment, I committed a cardinal sin and deleted the photo off my card without first reviewing it on my computer… I know I know, but there was really no saving this jewel, it was very clearly a dead fish.

My Second Attempt
Night two… So, since I didn't take the time to plan ahead and research star trail photography techniques before hand I was pretty much playing a game of trial and error.

This time I doubled my shutter speed to 20 minutes; set my aperture to f/11 and bumped my ISO to 200. There was a bright moon out that lit up the bluffs and riverbed nicely. I also used my flashlight and attempted to paint the bluffs in. But after looking at the photo I’m not sure it was powerful enough to even show up. I didn’t notice any areas in the photo that looked painted, so again I’m just guessing here. I used my standard equipment, my Canon 5D and my 24-70mm f/2.8L.

The Verdict

Ok, so my first impression... the raw file out of the camera was not even close to the results I was hoping for. What I got was a really grainy and fairly underexposed shot. Not too bad I suppose for my first attempts. But if I had been prepared and done a little research before hand, I may have when home with a great shot and not one I had to spend time cleaning up in Photoshop.

I was able to reduce a lot of the noise in Lightroom. I also dropped the White Balance temperature, which really improved the overall mood from blah to a nice blue. Shooting in RAW allowed me to bump up the exposure and fill light with very little increase in noise. While I would have loved to get all of this right in the camera, I was at least able to go home with, in my opinion a pretty nice star trail photo.

Lessons Learned and Advice Offered
1. There is ZERO cell phone service in the Ponca area, which also means zero Internet on my phone… So…do your homework and plan ahead, research several techniques, print them off and bring them with you.

2. I think maybe ISO 200 was probably a bit high for this long of an exposure and probably the reason for the great deal of noise on my photo. Next time I plan to drop to ISO 50 and open up my lens more.

While I’m not sure any of this information will actually be of use to anyone other than pure amusement. I hope this at least gives you some insight to how I got the shot and serves as a reminder that planning is a very important part of the process.

I'm hoping to get out and try this again really soon, so expect a Part II to this blog posting.   Wish me luck.