A couple of years ago I took my first star trails photographs. I only took a few exposures on black & white film and they all turned out good, that meaning you could see the trails of light from the stars. But the prints I got back were very flat and grey. I'm still not sure if it was the lab overcompensating for the complete darkness of the sky with only the little bit of light from the stars, or if it was actually light pollution since I live in the city. So I just scanned the little 4x6 print I got, bumped up the contrast, and I am actually quite pleased! They aren't technically "perfect" but I quite like that they're black & white instead of color, a little grainy, and a little awesome.I should take more, try using color as well as black & white, film as well as digital, and try varying the time my shutter is left open. I can't remember for sure, but I think in this photograph the exposure was anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes long...
Edit: Do these photos look bitmapped or pixelated to you? Because they do on my computer when they are viewed on blogger. But they look fine in flickr and when they are opened in Photoshop. Stupid internet making my pictures look horrible...
Source: Andrea Despot
2 comments:
We've tried it once, in the desert, and we had our shutters open for a few hours. If I'm not mistaken we did it on a full moon night, but this was too long ago to remember :)
I like your results though too!
now that i think about it, the moon was shining the night i took mine too! that probably explains why the sky was such a light grey...
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