My experience with shooting the stars and trails to make a star trails photograph for the first time.

A few months ago back in November I decided to attempt a star trails photograph for the first time. I had tried just photographing the beautiful Idaho sky months before and now I wanted to try stars and their trails. It was kind of out on a wimb. I was sitting there one night looking at the sky from my window and wanted to try something new. I looked up some tips online for about 10 minutes. Richard Gottardo wrote an article with steps specifically on this that helped a lot especially when it came to editing in Photoshop. I recommend checking out his article if you want to try this. So with a quick glimpse at his article I set out back to the same location where I had gone to shoot the first time

Here’s my original photograph from the summertime:

There are two methods to creating a star trails image, one being a one single exposure where you camera’s shutter is open and recording the information for 30 minutes to however long you want it to (or however long your battery lasts). Since this was my first time and I had school the next morning I didn’t want to wait around 30 minutes to find out I had messed up on my exposure or something and waste that 30 minutes. I went with the second method of taking multiple exposures then layering them in Photoshop as instructed in the Richard’s article.

Here are 2 of the 55 images I layered together:

A remote is highly recommended, especially if your automatic shutter doesn’t seem to work like mine didn’t. This photo not only holds beautiful star trails but the memory of me sitting in my car with my shutter remote to click the shutter every 30 seconds over a 30 minute period to get at least 55 images to layer in Photoshop. Good times!