Here in the northern hemisphere, night photographers are starting to come out of their winter slumber and getting ready for the summer night photography season. If you’re looking for some quick tips on shooting star trails on your next over night photography excursion, today is your lucky day.
Coming from B&H Photo and Gabe Biderman is a quick star trail tutorial from set up to to post processing. Biderman gives us a great run down in this video of how to create star trails with how he sets focus to what equipment and settings work best for him. With cameras becoming better at handling low ISO noise and having greater pixel density, night photography is becoming less post processing centric and even more accessible to obtain great results with very little after shoot work.
Timing is one of the biggest parts of night time photography and this isn’t brought up in the video. For shooting star trails and creating a foreground that has impact, you may want some light hitting your foreground subject. If this is the case, shooting with external lighting or during a partial moon is a fantastic time to try out star trail imagery. If you’re looking at night time photography beyond the Milky Way photos that are surely on their way in the coming months, definitely check out how to shoot star trails with Biderman.
Also, if you're looking to take your night time photography and post processing abilities to a higher level, definitely check out the Photographing the World 2: Cityscape, Astrophotography, and Advanced Post Processing Tutorial from Fstoppers.
One thing I've never done, should give it a go sometime.
Nice process run-through.
Definitely give it a try next time your out in a cool area overnight.
Very good video, thanks. I haven't done star trails yet. But there are plenty of dark areas here in northern Arizona, even just a few minutes from my house. I've actually wanted to give this technique a try at the Grand Canyon. Maybe I can pull it off later this year when I'm at the North Rim.
Have Fun,
Jeff