Hole In The Sky - Drakensberg, South Africa
Many years ago, I found myself standing on a freezing mountainside in the dead of winter, trying to capture my first ever “startrail” photo. From my limited research on the subject, I knew that I had to try keep the shutter open for as long as possible in order to capture the stars streaking across the night sky - and that was it. ISO? F stop? No idea. Yep, I wasn’t too clued up on the whole process.
To keep the shutter open for what ended up being a 90 minute exposure, I tied an elastic band around my camera, with a pencil positioned over the shutter button. Laugh all you want, but it worked…somehow. MacGyver would have been proud.
Fast forward to 2018, and my photography equipment has progressed leaps and bounds. New camera, new lenses, new lighting, tripod etc. I’d shot the night skies on many different occasions since then, but never really explored the startrail aspect much further. I guess I just didn’t have the patience to stand outside for hours in the hopes that the photo would work out - shooting a much shorter exposure of the stars / milky way is far easier.
Until recently…
What you see above is an exposure coming in at an estimated 75 minutes, which was shot on a recent trip to the Drakensberg mountains. Instead of one really long exposure, I created this image by shooting a bunch of consecutive 30 second exposures, and merging them later using the great (and free) program Starstax. As much as some people may consider this cheating, the end result is still the same, and there’s much more room for experimentation. Imagine shooting a full two hour exposure, only to find out that your focus was ever so slightly off? Or perhaps underexposed? No thanks.
Note: I did pause the process for a bit about halfway through, as I was worried for my sensor / shutter. That explains the gap in trails.
Nowadays, to keep the camera shutter firing, I have a small piece of equipment called a Triggertrap, which connects my 6D to my Android phone and gives a massive range of shooting options. Sadly, Triggertrap is now out of business, making this handy cable and cellphone app combination a rare sight.
It really can't get any easier than this. No excuse for laziness anymore.
Fortunately, I’ve been gifted with the opportunity to head back to this exact location in just over a months time, so you can be sure that there will be more starscapes to follow, provided the weather is suitable. Let’s hope so - I need some nice new prints to decorate my lounge with.
Thanks to Black Sabbath for the title inspiration!
Bonus photo
This was taken much later on the same night from my balcony. I sat out here for hours, just watching the universe roll by. Needless to say, it was incredibly relaxing.
Equipment Setup:
| Camera | Canon 6D |
| Settings | 30 second exposure / f4.0 / ISO 800 (for a single photo) |
| Lens | Tokina 10-17mm fisheye |
| Additional | Manfrotto tripod |
| Processing | Lightroom CC / Photoshop CC |
I like the trail gaps, it makes it seem more like a hole in space!
Thanks to @anouk.nox, this post was resteemed and highlighted in today's edition of The Daily Sneak.
Thank you for your efforts to create quality content!
Excellent capture. Dailysneak brought me here.
Not to mess with your cosmology here but you may have stumbled upon one of the crucial pieces of evidence that.... things are different than we have been told if one really thinks about this capture and what it means...
Wow it really looks unreal.. great shots!
Thanks for taking a look @anouk.nox, glad you like them :)
wow, really great photo, and I really appreciate you sharing you method! I miss doing long exposures, but somehow can't make it work very well on my current camera.. It's just a small compact type camera, yes (fujifilm x20), but I used to have a really shitty digital camera that was somehow great at long exposure!
SO AWESOME! HAVE A RESTEEM!
I wasn't really yelling..but this is really cool.
Haha! Thanks a lot for the resteem @photofeed :)
Nice work. Not cheating at all. Also let’s you take out shooting stars and satellites which can lesson the trails. .
That's also a good point @intrepidphotos :) Satellite trails do sometimes add in an unwanted element - weird straight line through the lovely curved lines.
Glad to know someone else agrees with me on the "cheating" aspect.
Well if the only way to get the star trail in the 1980's was to take multiple 30 second shots and combine them we would think that taking a single 3 hour exposure was cheating. It is all just arbitrary ways of capturing a single perception of reality.
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This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
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