Image Title: Windswept / Image & Words: Cowboy with a Camera

Star trails are something that can be a lot of fun to capture at night. Using an intervalometer or remote shutter you can setup to capture these using several different methods. Firstly you must make sure your camera is setup to be focused on the stars and then you can try capturing the star trail.

The first method you can use to capture star trails is by setting your camera into BULB mode and locking the shutter to take an extremely long exposure using a lower ISO and capturing anywhere from 10 minutes to hours.

The second method is the one in which I prefer to use and that is to capture many exposures and then blend the images in post processing. For instance, this image here was captured using 600+ 20second exposures and then blending them together in a "Lighten" lay mode in Photoshop. Once the star trail was processed I then used one of the single exposure image to get the Milky way to pop out of the image by layering the star trail and one of the single exposure photographs.

With the star trail I lower the opacity until I find the balance that I wanted with the single exposure and star trail combined.

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