Confessions of a Star Trail Maniac

I can't deny but I'm addicted to shooting star trails. If there's a clear sky and it's dark, I will always shoot a star trail sequence. I just can't help myself.

The process pretty much every time is to shoot a sequence of images and then stack them in Photoshop with a Lighten Blend mode. The processing side of things in the past has taken hours and hours to mess around with but now I have a super fast computer, it's way easier than it used to be.

For each of these images, I generally use a shutter speed of anything from 10 to 30 seconds and each frame has a one second interval between each exposure.

Rievaulx Abbey - the landscape edition

This evening was an adventure but I was determined to get exactly this shot.

The gates to Rievaulx Abbey were locked tight and all access appeared to be barred. So we took a discrete walk trying to look inconspicuous and found a way in. An undignified way in unfortunately! This involved hopping over a wooden spiked fence which was just high enough to endanger my wedding tackle and squash things that should never be squashed. A walk along a dry stone wall in the adjacent field was followed by the most undignified climb over said wall and a shuffle and stumble until finally we were in!

The red lighting inside the abbey was from a remotely triggered flashgun with a red gel.

I've also been having a hard time spelling Rievaulx. It's very Norman French but still it slows down my typing!!

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Rievaulx Abbey - the vertical edition

Once I bagged the above image, I stumbled around in the dark trying to avoid tripping over ancient rocks to find another point of view. Unfortunately I failed and ended up tripping and blood was pouring down my leg.

Undaunted and with an attitude of let's carry on, we've come this far, I set this sequence going.

I've found with star trails, 45 minutes worth of 30 second exposures is more than enough to shoot a sequence. Any more seems to make not much of a difference.

Two hours getting bored under the stars

This is an example of a two hour sequence of 30 second exposures. It looks good to me but two hours is an awful long to wait stood there doing absolutely zip!

For this shot I used a 12mm full frame fish eye lens and tilted the camera upwards to create this crazy distorted horizon. Note to self, I must do this again!

Belmount Tower

After a climb up a slippery muddy hill, I reached the top absolutely knackered! I found Polaris (aka the North Star) and lined up the building where the corner overhang aligns perfectly.

I set up a remotely triggered flashgun out of view of the camera to light the insides of the tower.

The added bonus here for me was the overhanging tree appearing to point towards Polaris.

The walk back down the hill was just as treacherous but at least I got the shot!

Windmill Addict

Local to me is North Leverton Mill and it's sufficiently far away enough from any towns or cities to be quite dark at night. I wanted to align Polaris behind the fan tail on the mill and while I took ages checking and rechecking where Polaris was, this is still giving me an OCD nightmare!

This was one hour's worth of 30 second exposures.

Harboro Rocks Rocks!

I have a habit of getting home in the middle of the night having just shot a star trail sequence and not being able to resist processing the stack until the early hours. This leads to a sleep deprived idiot roaming like a zombie who should have known better at his advanced years!

Another sequence with 45 minutes of 30 second exposures. I set up a remotely triggered flashgun behind the pillars which involved quite a bit of repositioning until I got the lighting as I wanted.

Magpie Mine

This particular point of view is the stuff of nightmares. I turn up invariably with the wrong lens. I don't like to travel with too much gear and to get this image you need to go wider than expected. In this place if you step too far back to fit the whole mine in the frame, there's a 10 foot drop on to rock which isn't the most desirable outcome!

Another sequence of 45 minutes.

The Temple of Alignment

This place is not actually called a temple but I was rather pleased with myself to align Polaris exactly where it needed to be.

I lit the "temple" with flashlights then set the 45 minute sequence going.

I had to crop this to 16 x 9 format due to an annoying overhanging branch which was very distracting!

About me:
I usually specialise in shooting lightpainting images but occasionally dabble in urbex, landscape and artistic model photography. I'm always on the lookout for someone to collaborate with; the social side of photography is always good!

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