Fundamentals 3: Creating Star Trails (CC)

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Night photography, like many disciplines, is achieved one step at a time. You need to walk before you can run. Creating star trails is the next step in your night journey.

The concepts from Matt Hill’s talk “Where Do I Start?” and Tim Cooper’s talk on photographing the Milky Way will give you a solid foundation on capturing sharp stars. In this talk Gabe Biderman will build on that to guide you on making iconic star trail imagery.

In this presentation, Gabe teaches everything you need to know about capturing, creating and processing star trail photographs. It begins with an explanation of how to take your initial star point exposures and calculate the longer exposures necessary to create the star trail effect. Next he talks about how different situations require different approaches to the initial capture. Both long and short exposures can be used to make these magical images and by the end of this class you’ll have the confidence and knowledge to use them both.

The last section of this presentation covers necessary equipment (such as an intervalometer, or an external battery pack) to ensure you have the right gear for the right job.

While Photoshop is not entirely necessary to create star trails, it does open up more opportunities to capture them. Gabe finishes this info-packed session with a simple demonstration of how easy it is to use Photoshop to help create star trail imagery from a stack of photos.