Tag Archives: star
Star Trails over Austrian Church
We had four days of hot weather and blue cloudless skies in Austria.
Though this meant harsh lighting and, at times, unbearable heat throughout the day, it also meant that we could see the stars easily at night time…and this meant I could try my hand at a little late night star photography.
I have had one attempt at star trails previously; but as this was in the UK on a cold night it really didn’t come out very well. The long exposure I did at the time meant the camera got hot, and as it was so cold the lenses just fogged up. In Austria it was the perfect temperature at night to do them.
I set up my camera beside this church which is on top of a hill in Wildschonau; it had taken some walking to get there at night and I had managed to lose my glasses in a field somewhere (recovered the next day while it was light – hurrah). I used the Promote Control to set off a timelapse sequence and took 30 second exposure for a 30 minute period. The inside of the church was lit by a solitary candle and taken over one exposure of around, I think, 90 seconds.
The exposures were then dropped into Photoshop and layers changed to the Lighten blending mode, followed by a little bit of post to get rid of plane trails and work on the foreground. I’m pretty happy with the final result.
Thanks very much to Scott Wood for the tip on how to quickly and easily produce this within Photoshop and without the need for additional software plugins…it really was simpler than I had imagined it would be.
