Assignment 7: Night

Babacar Ndoye: All the Lights in the Sky

I’ve always wanted to try a star trail photo and I consider the night sky to be one of the most beautiful things in nature, so I rented a wide angle lens and set up outside. I kept my tripod as low to the ground as possible, and used a cable release remote in conjunction with the continuous shooting mode on my camera to take 172 photos. After a few test shots I settled on a 30 second exposure at ISO 400 and aperture f/1.4. I used a tungsten white balance in order to give the sky a cooler feeling and highlight the stars. I left my camera for an hour and fifteen minutes, then took 4 more exposures with the lens cap on. I stacked my photos using StarStax, then increased vibrance and adjusted the curve in Photoshop. When stacking the photos I did have to remove 2 because an airplane flew through the frame and left a bright streak. There weren’t any trees that would have acted as a compositional reference point nearby, so I had to make do with the power lines. I really wanted to use something natural, but the lines and post added a nice foreground focus and I placed them so as to be low in the shot. I really liked how the star trails came out, especially with how the colors varied. This photo fulfills requirement 1 (An Outdoor Night Scene of Nature)