Star Trails!
Last weekend, Christine and I headed on out to Homedale, Idaho to attend Water on the Ditch, the annual party/jam session thrown by some of our good friends each year. As always when travelling, I took my camera with me, but I wanted to make sure I tried some new things out. Because always taking the same kind of shot gets boring, y'know?
The one type of photography you simply can't do in Portland is star trails; the light pollution from the city simply outshines the faint imprints left by the stars. I did try some when Christine and I camped out in Central Oregon (now forever known as "The Ankle Trip"), but I obviously wasn't thinking straight and shot at ISO400, adding so much noise to the shot as to render it useless.
So I tried a shot on both nights. The first one was okay, but nothing special. However, the second night's shot turned out perfectly:
This is an hour long exposure facing almost directly north. The camera settings were ISO100 at ƒ/8, 17mm focal length. A lot of people suggest opening the aperture all the way up, but I was concerned that doing this would totally blow out the foreground detail (which I was hoping would be the best part of the shot), so I closed it up a few stops. Of course, the camera was mounted on a sturdy tripod and the exposure was started and ended with a cable release. I had the long exposure noise reduction option in the camera set to "On", but I have since read that you shouldn't really bother with this, as post-production noise-reduction in Photoshop or via a plug-in like Noise Ninja will always produce a better effect.
I really am amazed this turned out so well. The foreground is everything I could have hoped for and then more. The light from the stage on the trees surrounding the house is quite magical, and there are lots of little details from lights that went on and off during the exposure as well: someone walking with a flashlight, headlights from a car turning into the property, camera flashes and so on.
Post-production was limited to noise reduction (it still needed it, although not to a huge degree), cloning out some dead or hot pixels in the image and then adding some extra saturation/brightness to the colors. It prints beautifully at 13"x19" on our Canon Pixma Pro 9000 and we plan on giving one to our friends who host the Ditch each year as a token of our appreciation for this most excellent of parties!
The more we get out of the city, the more of these I'm going to take... I can only get better with experience!
Posted in: chaosboy, oregon, party time, photography on July 4, 2009 at at 2:56:00 PM