Railway to the centre of the Galaxy

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the next train is leaving platform earth in …

Following on from the previous night Star Trail session (https://plus.google.com/100975265940134223422/posts/7dfL8PdWNbg), this time I opted for more data, like any engineer, more data is never a bad thing – this set of trails was over the space of 5 or so hours and included the moon rising in the early morning.

Its very interesting to see how the AutoWB deals with the scene as the light changes over the night, over the 5 hours there was about 4 really significant changes in the white balance, all which would have been easily sorted out if I had set a fixed WB. In the end it actually makes little or no difference to the actual trail set since alot of that data actually gets cancelled out.

Techie stuff
331 images stacked together using the statistics method in Adobe PS CC and yep it takes awhile
This time I shuffled the foreground shot to get things to line up and fullfill the iniital vision of the tracks leading right into the tip of the galaxy. This time I changed the shutter to a bit long 55 or so seconds, really this makes little difference but just meant things ended up pretty bright, I actually had to darken the sky considerably to get the trails to stand out the way I wanted.

D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 55.6 seconds (331 shots)
ISO: 3200
out front – long metal things commonly referred to as railway tracks.

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.

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.

Cosmic Railway

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Its a dizzy ride to the centre of the galaxy

I learnt a few lessons from the last star trail session at the sandy side of Anna Bay, firstly.. go somewhere where there is no sand, tick. secondly set the timer correctly, tick
(note the malfunction from last time was actually due to the fact that I set the camera mode to single shot, this meant I missed an interval every shot and hence the 40 second gap between shots in my last one. It needs to be set to continuous low or high.
I still have a slight gap in the extreme view of the frame, but still better than the other attempt.

So with those key points addressed – for the next star trail session I think i need the following.. warmer location :), set the white balance to something consistent 😉 and take care of local wildlife or farm animals 😉 There was a cow terrorising this railway the following morning 🙂

This was a set of images from a fairly short time period, just over 2 hours, I do have another set at over 5 hours, however the moon rose within that period and there was some pretty funky autoWB changes throughout that set, thats for a rainy day processing session!

techie stuff
192 images stacked together using the statistics method in Adobe PS CC
(see here https://plus.google.com/100975265940134223422/posts/VnN5muFSypj)
The foreground image included a bit more on the bottom which gave me the ability to get a slight vertical pano shot happening.

D7000 coupled with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm- Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 45.5 seconds
ISO: 3200
out front – long metal things commonly referred to as railway tracks.

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.