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Take your Time 1 – Star Trails

1 September 2007 973 views 4 Comments

 


Seldom have the chance to do star trails in s’pore becos of too much light pollution from artifical light. You need a real dark place with and i last did the photo above  during a camping trip at Berkelah Waterfalls.

Due to long exposure, battery power will be consumed fast so make sure you have a fully charged battery and extra batteries if you are in the remote areas.

Steps for those.

  1. Tripod mounted camera with cable release or remote control. usually a wide angle lens is used
  2. Set to ISO 200 or less , f 8-f11 , BULB mode,  Manually focused to infinity.
  3. it will be hard to composed due to dim light but exclude any artifical lights in yr frame.
  4. Trigger the shutter and leave it on for 1/2hrs or more.

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4 Comments »

  • CheekZ said:

    Hey… this is interesting, i’m going to try it out when i see a chance. Thanks for sharing :)

    # 4 September 2007 at 1:46 pm
  • lowcq (author) said:

    yeah… pls try.. maybe when you are overseas or some really dark dark place in singapore. There should not be any lights out there else it will pollutes the photo.

    # 6 September 2007 at 9:29 am
  • qs said:

    hi, just curious, will turning to Bulb mode cause the picture to be overexpose? I have not tried it but I was set shutter speed to 40 seconds trying to shoot some water waves so as to make it smooth but somehow pictures turn out overexposed… what can be done to overcome this?

    # 13 August 2009 at 4:46 pm
  • Cheng (author) said:

    it wouldn’t be overexposed as you are pointing the camera at the very dark sky. You need to ensure there is no artificial or moonlight nearby.

    For the waves, you have to see how bright is the ambient light. If it is bright eg sunrise then 40 secs might cause it to be overexposured even if you already set to lowest ISO and smallest aperture. You can add on a Circular polarizer or ND filter to reduce the light.

    hope this helps.

    # 13 August 2009 at 5:38 pm

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