Startrails
Startrails at the Dobratsch near villach
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Startrails at the Dobratsch near villach
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Follow me on facebook:
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Oct, 2014Views
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itsnickelwell
December 02, 2014
thats amazing! Must have been out for a few hours to get enough pictures for this shot! beautiful work as always
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Behind The Lens
Location
This picture has been taken on a mountain called Dobratsch (2.166m of hight) near a city called Villach in Austria. It wasn't really easy to reach this spot because of 1 meter fresh snow. I had to walk up this place, which takes normally about 45 min from the street, but I wasn't that fast, the snow slowed me down so it took me around of 2 hours. Not that easy in the dark and cold night hiking with my backpack and my tripod.Time
I started in the middle of the night, equipped with my flashlight and hiked up. I reached the place at around of 2 o'clock in the morning. To get the final image, I stayed until the sunrise on the top of the mountainLighting
As you can see, the picture shows the movement of the stars. This picture is made out of 130 single exposures with a exposure time of 30 seconds each picture. Those have been combined to get the startrails effect. It took more than an hour to get the right spot and of course the correct exposure. After more than one hour of an intervall shooting, my pictures where ready for post processing, without my tee I would be frozen in the cold of this winter night.Equipment
This capture has been taken with a Nikon D600 and the Nikon 16-35 F4 Lens. All exposured with 30 seconds, F/4 and ISO 2500. The camera had to stand still so I had to use my tripod, a Cullman 525 Magnesit.Inspiration
I've seen a lot of pictures of startrails so it was one of my projects that winter to get a shot like this. First of all it was necessary to find the correct spot. I decided to take this picture on this high mountain as there is less light pollution as in the city, you can get clearer shots of the stars and you still have a awesome view down to the valley.Editing
For this picture i reedited all of these 130 RAW single exposures with "lightroom", exported those with the maximum resolution to .jpg. Now all of those pictures looked like the same, only the stars moved with every picture. For the final image, those 130 pictures has been stacked with the program "starstax" into one picture.In my camera bag
My most important thing in my bag is for sure my Nikon D600. As a landscape photographer another important equipment is my wide angle lens, the Nikon 16-35 F4. Furthermore I take my lenses, Tamron 24-70 2.8 and my Nikkor 70-300 4.5-5.6, all the times with me. As I shot a lot of times at night, my flashlight is also all the time in my bag. Besides of my lenses there are also some filters which I use, a Haida 1.8 ND, Haida 3.0 ND and a Hitech 0.9 GND (SE) used with a Cokin Z Filterholder. I also carry my flash, the Nikon SB-700, and some batteries with me to never run out of power.Feedback
To get a picture like this, search for a place with less light pollution (like on a mountain or far away from street lamps and a city) and in best case go on a cloudless new moon night for the pictures. Take a stable tripod with you, because the camera has to stay as stable as possible, even several hours and there is nothing worse as some blurry images because of a loose tripod. Another important step is that you focus manually to get the stars as sharp as possible and make sure that the autofocus is turned off, otherwise the camera can go out of focus which will destroy the pictures. Make sure you have at leased a 2nd battery with you, because of the long exposures and of the cold night your battery can be extremely fast low of power. Make use of the interval function within the Nikon cameras or if you don't have this make use of an intervalometer. Afterwards I can recommend Lightroom for post processing the single pictures as you can edit one picture and sync the settings to all other captures and the 2nd tool, Starstax for stacking the images as it is extremely simple to use and very quick to finalise the image.
