Star Trails
It's cold out, and that's a good thing. A southerly snap often brings crispy clear skies, and as much as a dramatic cloudscape exciting and well, dramatic, clear skies offer up a chance to stretch the camera's [and owner's!] capabilities. While I'm a advocate of analogue photography it has to be acknowledged that digital cameras can create some great effects fast. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job.
Last night while you were huddled around the heater
Star trail images are not that easy to make, apart from living in the very aptly named Land of the Long White Cloud- where cloudless nights are all too rare, you do need some pretty costly toys. An upper end digital camera, a high quality fast wide angle lens, a very heavy duty tripod, an electronic release and a powerful computer that's going to handle 160 high resolution images getting stacked into one massive file. But a welcome side effect of making a star trail image is that you can use the very same files to make a time-lapse like this;
Here's a star trail that was made last winter;
Just click on the image to see it larger
And this is what it looks like framed up in a client's living room...
