Cosmic Rays

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Light speed down the railroad 😉

I always wanted to try this technique, its pretty simple, just zoom the lens whilst the shutter is open – a couple of tips, which i will use next time (i learnt the hard way) to hopefully improve it.

– carefully zoom so not to move the camera/lens, otherwise you get non-straight zooming stars 🙂
– time the zoom sequence to fill up the shutter speed, also try starting slow and speeding up to create a ramp down effect.
– slightly defocus the lens to get more prominent zoomage

you basically need 3 shots for this , one with the zooming star trails, one for the foreground and one for the sky (under the zoomage), simply stack and mask out the zoomage where it kits the foreground, otherwise it looks like gamma rays.. you know the ones that past thru everything…or is that alpha rays? anyway, you get the idea.

3 shots
D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm

Shot 1 (foreground, twilight ) Aperture: f/9.5 and Shutter Speed: 1/3 seconds
ISO: 100
Shot 2 (background) Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 45.5 seconds
ISO: 3200
Shot 3 (zoomage) Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 45.5 seconds
ISO: 3200 with lens zooming

Lovely jubbly and thanks for looking – I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed and always appreciate the time people take to have a look, plus and/or comment.

45 thoughts on “Cosmic Rays”

  13. Genial! I tried this effect with the illuminated bridge in Sydney last summer … but nothing compares to the smoothness and quality of your result!
    This is a very beautiful composition again, your photos are fantastic!

  23. +Ben Ashmole
    , give it a crack! yeah a long zoom range would be heaps better – i only have 11-16 but something like a 16-35 on full frame would be perfect i reckon. This will give you longer trails but I reckon you still need to defocus slightly to widen up the trail.

  26. +Mike Hankey
    , it took a couple of goes to get it right and its pretty easy with a small zoom range like the 11-16, basically i just counted it out for the 45secs, you can see it sat at each end of the zoom range for a bit longer as depicted by the larger bright points at each end of the trail/zoomage.
    The first one I did was all wonky and looked crap 😉

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