Pic of the Week - Page 92
Star trails over Llanthony Priory
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Location: Llanthony Priory in the Black Mountains of Wales. I stood outside for most of the night to capture the series of images in this shot. The camera was set up about dusk and I waited for it to get fully dark, at about 7:00pm. The foreground of the Priory was captured by manually painting it with a 2,000,000 candle power flash light during a 30-second exposure. The camera was then set to continuously record star trails. Unfortunately, a brief storm came through about 9:00pm so the camera had to be turned off and covered in a large waterproof sack. When the sky had almost completely cleared by just after midnight, the sequence was then restarted. The next 4 hours provided the images for the trails. Since the camera had not been moved, I was able to use the original foreground image. This image was captured from 12:30am right through to 4:30am using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkII camera and Canon TS-E 17mm f/4 L lens. I used Liveview and 10x magnification to manually focus on the priory wall. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, 30 seconds, f/11, ISO 400 (ISO800 for the trails), and daylight white balance. I then captured a series of 450 frames. The RAW processing, editing and saving of the images was all done in Photoshop CS/5. The images were all combined in a free program called Startrails.exe. Full details of how to set up the image capture and the processing steps are in PhotoPlus, issue 45. Click here to improve your photography ... on the Isle of Wight |