Ghouls, gals and the search for the portal – (c) 2014 Gerard Blacklock
134 frames
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/4 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 500s for the lighting painting frames.
Iso 640 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – expenise grave site.
Lightpainting: lots of Blue EL wire around the base, LED torch selectively applied with the street lighting off to the left

Sneaky Sunday Night startrails
I don’t think I would have ever thought that I would end up (alive anyway) sitting amongst a whole stack of rather upmarket grave sites taking star trails shots and eating pizza.
That said, the idea had crossed my radar a few times before and with the conditions just right with moon rise well into the wee hours of the morning this was another great location with very little light pollution (excluding all them planes)

Unlike the previous Malabar session I decided to make the effort and clone out all the boats and plane trails, alittle tedious, but for this one probably worth the effort.
All images loaded into a stack in PS CC and individual layers adjusted to remove the offending aircraft and boat trails.

Similarly to the previous session it appears my version of the +My Nikon Life Nikkor 16-35mm f4 does some weird stuff. It would appear that the right hand side of the image has significantly less sharpness than that of the left, this is the same as the malabar session which i had put down to some weird phenomenon, the fact that its noticeable even on a fairly low resolution jpegs has me concerned, reviewing some of the other images it appears to be severely exacerbated at f4 and improves when stopping down.

So, how does a lens be sharp on one side and not the other? maybe misaligned glass elements? has anyone else experienced this? anyone wanna take a few test shots at f4 to compare?

So back to the cemetery, no ghouls were spotted, but i certainly had my peepers nice and wide looking, a little bit.. well ok, lets be honest a swamps worth of blue EL wire and just a smattering of red completed the foreground shot, noting that the stock standard original foreground of the star shots actually looks pretty good also, the street lights off to the left (couple of hundred metres away) gave some nice natural side lighting.

No ghouls or grave sites were harmed nor disrespected in this session 🙂

Exif/setup data:
134 frames
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/4 and Shutter Speed: 60s (each star trail frame) and around 500s for the lighting painting frames.
Iso 640 for the trails. and 100 for everything else
out front – expenise grave site.
Lightpainting: lots of Blue EL wire around the base, LED torch selectively applied with the street lighting off to the left

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed.