A long time between blog posts...a new toy, and star trails!

It's been a *very* long time between blog posts, but I'm back on the bloggin' bandwagon and talking about a new toy my favourite photographer recently gave me.

I love doing long exposure night shots, and I've been experimenting more with star trails, so the aputure digital remote timer was a perfect gift for me. Mine actually has a cable which plugs into the cable release jack of my 5D II body, but it kinda looks like the one below.

This baby lets me set the camera to take say ten, five minute shots without actually touching the camera. You simply set the camera, set the timer, hit the go button and off it goes....click....wait....click....wait....no need to touch the camera, no need to use the iPhone or any other device to time your shot - with a few twiddles the camera goes off and does its own thing.

I had read about stacking star trail shots as an alternate method to the *very* long exposure shots I was used to doing. Stacking shots is where you take a bunch of images of the stars and then use software to "stack" or merge them together to form a classic star trail image.

I created this image from six, 60-second exposures (shot up at the Glasshouse Mountains), then stacked them using some awesome, FREE software called Startrails - it's available for download here.The final image would have looked better if I'd have stacked more images in the process, but it was enough to test the new toy and give me a feel for what it could do. I love it - much better than pfaffing around with a standard cable release!

Now...I just need to go find me some more stars...

Star Trails over the Flumes

Star Trails over the Flumes, originally uploaded by liquid in plastic.

Dan Newton's night work is fantastic! He discovered that when doing star trails (or long exposures at night), he could generate amazing images by doing a series of short exposures and stacking them in the post-processing phase.

He reckons it gets around the issues with noise, of doing what would otherwise be very long exposures (45-60 mins or longer).

I'm really keen to try this technique!

Dan also does some pretty impressive high speed work with eggs and glass. As you do! Check out his blog too - I found it inspiring.