Clare Grant ‘19

Things you will need:

• Intervalometer

• Camera

• Tripod

• If doing star trails

  • A clear sky

• If doing car trails

  • Preferably someone driving, but you can do it by yourself

  • A place with lots of cars driving by or drive to a highway

• Multiple batteries

What is an intervalometer?

An intervalometer allows you to choose how long you want your photo to be exposed and how often you want your camera to take photos in a set interval

Star Trails

• When taking star trails there are two different methods

  • One long photo

  • Many individual photos(In my opinion this one is easier)

• Many individual photos

  • Decide how long your star trails to be (the longer the time the longer the trails)

    • In the photo below I did it for about 2 and a half hours

  • For me, I planned to go longer (3 hours) and that’s what I recommend because you can always remove photos but you can’t add more photos to it once editing

  • Once you have the time you set your intervalometer

    • I recommend doing each one for 30 seconds for a total of 360 photos. (Which will be 3 hours worth of photos)

  • Your lens will most likely have an infinity focus (looks like an infinity sign). This is what you want to use to focus on the stars. If you are using a foreground, that will end up being in focus too if it is far away, but if it is closer you might want to mess around with it, but focus infinity will work most of the time

• Once you have all of your photos bring them into lightroom. Edit the first one to your liking and then, depending on which lightroom you use, there may be a setting to sync all settings from the first image to all of them (which saves a lot of time) or if not, you can make a preset (see Lydia’s preset tutorial here)

• Once you have them all edited to your liking, save them all into a folder

• Bring into “star stax” (See photo for app, if you google it you can download it)

  • You can layer them on top of each other in photoshop, but that’s a lot more work

• You can then use Star Stax to layer your photos for you and fix the “zipper” effect which may show up

  • Zipper effect is when there’s a mini bit of the star trail because of your camera processing the image or just when it stops to take the next photo.

• Wait for it to finish then..boom!

Settings:

Focal Length: 15mm

Aperture: F/2.8

Exposure: 30 second exposure for 2.5 hours layered on top of each other

Tips:

Interesting foreground

Patience

Clear sky

No moon

Examples

Car Light Trails

How to:

• You can either set it up in your car and use the intervalometer or use bulb mode

  • Having someone else driving is both easier and safer and is what I recommend. I’ve tried both, and there’s a lot of stress with the latter.

    • A) You have to set up your tripod so it can stand without you

      • But because of this it is very uneasy because there is no easy way to make it stable, I’ve found even when I try my best, even on turns it will still fall

    • B) On the highway (and everywhere else), you need one hand off the wheel, and even that alone is dangerous on highways and everywhere else, plus you may be looking to see if you accidentally moved your camera and then you may crash or get hit.

• I’ve found if you are on a high way moving, or if you are taking photos of the highway with fast moving cars, 3 seconds is all you need

• Highways are the best usually or you can find a spot above a highway/out a window