Many times we see star trail photos and they are describing a perfect circle. There’s more than one direction to point your camera for a different effect.
Multiple cameras
As I was photographing a circular star trails composition to the north I found time to experiment with a second camera. Usually, I’ll bring a second and sometimes even a third camera when working the night sky compositions. Many after-dark images take ages to create. Multiple cameras give me the opportunity to bring home more possible winners. The night sky is infinite and I am continually working to capture some of that beauty.
To the west
The second camera looked to the western sky. When you point the camera away from the Earth’s poles the stars take a different turn. In this case, I couldn’t use the Olympus’ camera feature of LIVE COMP which records only new light information as the exposure is made. Instead, I decided to capture a time-lapse sequence with which to blend the new light showing the passage of time. Why? Because there was a road with traffic between me and the red rocks. The constant light recording would have caused overexposure along the highway.
Post processing
Since traffic was somewhat sporadic I removed many of the exposures with car lights in them. The remaining images were loaded into Photoshop Layers after an overall exposure correction. The Blend Mode of all layers was changed to Lighten. This allows the light streaks to record without changing the shadows. Because of the removed car light images, there were more spaces in the star trails than I liked. Enter Path Blur to the rescue. I separated the foreground from the sky. Add a path blur to the sky area and ended with a different representation of the star movement.
Single image post processing
I took a single image of the scene and went artsy-fartsy on it. I toned the image with complementary colors of blue and orange for the final. Images were made with Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III and the M.Zukio 12-100 f/4
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
