Images that people can't stop sharing and talking about. This guide will help you imagine, plan and shoot Star Trails images nobody has taken before. The good news is that with a little help everybody can create striking Star Trails images.Įven if these are the first words you're reading about Star Trails photography. "The movement of the static stars, the traces of time, together with a breathtaking foreground."Īnd this, my friend, is incredibly hypnotic! Something that's happening out there, in the universe, but no one can see with the naked eye: Such is the magnetic power of Star Trails.īecause you're showing something remarkable to the world. It's as if the spirals made of bright stars were trapping people's eyes, in the same way a deep black hole would engulf the Millennium Falcon itself. Images that people can't simply stop staring at. That should eliminate the Bayer high frequencies so that no beating results after compositing.Every time you shoot a Star Trails image and share it on Instagram or Facebook, you get more interactions, more likes, more surprising comments such as:īecause Star Trails are those type of images people love. Try filtering each picture down by 2x before compositing. The high frequency Bayer noise of any two raw images from your camera would be the same, even if the angle of view they represented changed slightly due to dimension changes. This would only apply if you separately scaled the two pictures to overlap them.
Your description is vague in what you actually did, but if you compoosited two separate pictures, possibly the dimensions of your sensor changed very slightly between the two pictures due to a change in temperature. To fix this, the best answer is to not try to merge two versions of a picture that have very small differences in their scale. However, if you merge two versions of a picture where one has very slightly different scaling than the other, you get a low frequency beat signal. Normally you don't see this and don't care because the frequency is high. Put another way, the raw data has some regular high frequency content due to the Bayer matrix. If so, this is a rare case where working in raw is actually hurting.
I'm guessing this has to do with two overlays that were very slightly misaligned from each other such that the small variations in each image due to the Bayer matrix become apparent.
#STARTRAIL MAKE MOVIE STARSTAX SERIES#
I tried another series of images that were taken facing south and didn't get the strange effect.Īfter doing some more reading this morning I realise I should be exposing for at least a minute and use a combo of screen and lighten to get smoother trails but again, it's the weird moire that has got me stumped. The moire like pattern only becomes apparent on flattening the image. I first tweaked the exposure and reduced noise in Adobe Bridge, then imported the photos as layers to Photoshop CS5 where I used the lighten filter on each layer to show the trails.
#STARTRAIL MAKE MOVIE STARSTAX ISO#
The photos were taken at 18mm, with a 30sec exposure, an ISO of 4000 and an aperture of f5.6. Its the moire like pattern that results from stacking the individual photos. That's not what I'm worried about however. I was shooting to the south east so I'm getting the curvature from both poles in my trails. I was shooting with a 9-18mm f4-5.6 M.Zuiko lens on an E-P3 body. The pictures were taken at the Sunshine Coast in Australia.
I'm assuming it's the result of the lens but am unsure, and I have had a hard time defining it which makes searching the internet difficult. I'm new to taking star trails, and fairly new to photography in general.Īfter my first attempt at taking a star trail, I composited them in Photoshop and when I merged the layers I got this pattern over the image.