By: Clare Grant '19
Fast shutter speed
As you can see, it is all black, but if we adjust a few settings, it will start to show the light, in this case, the stars.
To get a lot of stars and to have the star trail longer we would need to keep the shutter open than the numbers given to us. To achieve this, we would need to turn the shutter dial to bulb mode. This will keep the shutter open as long as we have the shutter button held down. Now, who wants to keep their finger on their camera for 10+ minutes? No one that I know. To get around this obstacle, we will need an intervalometer. This allows us to keep the shutter open without us needing to do anything; we just need to flip the switch.
To show the difference in the time that you choose, I took 5 different photos at different intervals.
3 minutes:
In this photo, it was left alone for 3 minutes. As you can see, there are stars with some movement, but not as much as we would like. Because of this, we move to the next photo
15 Minutes
The trails are getting longer and more defined, but it could still use some more time
40 minutes:
This is after 40 minutes. The area that I chose didn’t have many stars in it, but as you can see the star trail for the stars that are in it are long, and that is a good amount of time to have a good long star trail.
1 hour
In this photo, you can see a lot of the stars and you have a good length of the trails. The exposure is too bright, so for this photo, and all photos with a long exposure, depending on the surrounding light, you would have to compensate with the exposure aperture of your camera.