Star Trails

I've wanted to properly have a go at Star Trail Photography for years. I came close a year ago by accident when taking night-time landscape shots in spain, but there was a bit too much light about for the effect to be that dramatic. I was recently staying on the coast in Anglesey (see my earlier posts) and the conditions were near enough perfect.
 
There are a couple of competing methods for achieving this kind of photograph circling about the net these days. The most popular seems to be to set up the camera (via a digital cable release, or via the camera's software) to take a series of 30 second exposures to the time desired and then comp these together in post. This way the inherant noise in the digital capture is overcome. I decided to cowboy it. I rigged up an elaborate system of elastic bands to hold down the shutter and I left the camera open for close to 30 minutes. I did this for a number of reasons. Firstly, combining lots of 30 second exposures is a lot of work, also you don't get the exposure of the foreground you do with a very long exposure, also as I had never used this camera (Nikon D300) for this type of photo before, I thought it would be interesting to see how bad the noise actually was. It wasn't that bad at all really. However, next time I do this type of image, I'll expose for a lot longer - 1 hour at least to get longer trails, and also I'll shoot on film.

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Anglesey Seascapes

Of course I couldn't spend time in Anglesey without visiting the coast a whole bunch.
 
I used this trip to have a play with a few new ND filters I picked up to get some really long shutter speeds. Always a learning curve with this type of thing, at one point I had four filters stacked in front of the lens, giving me close to ten stops of filtration. While this gave me 30 second exposures in the middle of the day, the distance the filters ended up being away from the lens, coupled with using a 10mm wide angle, meant that I got a lot of refraction and reflection. In a couple of shots you can clearly read the lens markings in the relection. If I'm going to try to stop down this much again I'm going to have to bite the bullet and spend some money on a single 10 stop ND.
 
The volume of filtration also threw up some strange colour issues, especially when using the graduated filters. Some of the effects I really like, but when colour is hugely important on a shoot, it's a good thing to bear in mind and a different solution might be called for.

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Anglesea Ancient Monuments

I recently spent the best part of a week on Anglesea.
 
During the time I tried to visit as many of the Ancient Burial Chambers and Standing stones as I could.
 
As the weather was (predictably) overcast and dull, I decided to try something a little different when photographing these sites. Over the last year I have been using off camera flash more and more, although it has only been recently that I have started bringing these little strobes with me into the wilds. I've started finding them to be great little devices to add little bits of sparkle and interest in landscapes, picking out bits of detail in quite a subtle way when balanced with the ambient light.
 
Howeve, for these images, I wanted something with a bit more impact, as I knew I would be doing a lot of post production on these images, and as I was moving pretty fast through the locations I decided to compose the images using multiple exposures with different flsh positions in each frame. From these images I was able to composite 'multi flash' images using only one strobe. Compositing the flash in post also let me have far greater control over the flash exposure values and colour temperature than I would have had time to do on location.

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Dee Rocks

Dee Rocks V is on it's way (30th May)
 
This year we're going to be filming the event and putting together a documentary, which is going to be a lot of fun. So to celebrate the festivities I thought I'd post some pictures from last years event.
 
If you haven't been to a Dee Rocks, you are missing out. Seeing local characters become genuine celebrities for three minutes is a spectacle that is hard to explain.

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Posted via email from Andrew Gale Photography