Lesson #7: Long Exposures - second & third attempt at star trails

As promised, I attempted a few star trails in my travels over Easter. These suckers are difficult. This is the first time I have found myself wishing for a film camera. Apparently it's easier.

As part of the .com generation, if I don't know something I Google it. Google is a verb, in case you are wondering. According to my extensive research (Wikipedia and photo forums) taking star trails with a bulb setting on a digital camera makes the camera prone to a lot of noise. Coupled with this, the sensor gets hot, creating pixel hot spots - the RGB dots that confused me last time. (A bulb setting is opening the shutter indefinitely to capture movements of light in low light conditions)

The digital technique - the consensus on the Internet was - to take a whole bunch of 30 second exposure shots, one with the foreground lit up, and a complete black one to reduce noise and then stack them in your processing afterwards. This is a long time to wait if you want long star trails, so I only have four attempts to share. I used the stacking method in Photoshop CS4. I was happy with the results, and learnt a number of valuable long exposure star trail tips:

1. Have a full battery - My battery ran out while attempting this at Karijini. It's OK, I had a spare, but not enough to waste on a shot that 'might work later.'
2. Have an empty CF card - I did have enough space but only because I shot in JPEG. It also helps to have a good quality card that will write the photo information quickly.
3. Remotes are gold - This means the shots are taken as close together as possible with as little break in the trail. I set the camera on continuous shooting and just pressed the remote button and left it at that.
4. Use a warm light when lighting the foreground - I only had an LED torch which as you will see, came out very cold. 
5. Do this on a still night with no clouds and as little light pollution as possible (including the Moon) - The moon interrupted the Karijini shot, and I got some interesting photos of lightening under stars, but the trails peter out. My final test wast interrupted by clouds, and therefore you can see breaks in the trails.

First attempt at Karijini. Either the tripod wasn't stable or the Image Stabilizer hadn't been turned off on the lens, but the trails are crooked. Plus you can see the light pollution from the Moon.

This is quite cool - I got a shooting star effect! Below the stars is where a fence was, but you can see how over time the moon came up and the stars faded - giving the shooting look.

Demonstrating the cold light of LED torch, as well as the importance of a still (meaning, no wind) night. There were also clouds that broke the trails.

This is the best of the four - taken at an increased focal length, which I think helped the clarity of the trail. Funnily enough the increased focal length was due to the storm in the distance - for lightning photos, see my Facebook page!

Mysteries of Misty Waters in Karijini

As promised, a second edition on the Karijini expedition. The jury is still out on the third. This trip was surprisingly good for water shots, despite the incredibly bright sun. Once down in the shade of the gorges, and the sun had started to disappear, water shots were so much fun to take. There is something so satisfying about setting up a shot, leaving the shutter open for a few seconds, and eagerly checking the LCD screen to see if the water is misty while the rocks are crystal clear.

Can I just say, I am so glad I do not have a film camera for water shots? Star trails - different story. I learnt so much from shot to shot - composition, timing, reducing camera shake, or in my case, tripod shake. Some of these things you just don't know with film until they are developed!

Once you have the settings done for a particular gorge, you can go from little run of water, to small waterfall, to bigger waterfalls, composing shots and taking misty water photos. I say again, it is so much fun. What would you do down those gorges without a camera I ask you?

The other thing that was really valuable from this trip is the amount I shot in RAW and had to process later. Only then did I realise I had the white balance wrong for a lot of my water shots, and it needed to be corrected in Camera RAW (a lot of my water had an odd blue tinge).

Check out some of my water shots below:

Handrail Pool, Weano Gorge Karijini NP. Canon EOS 50D (Betsy), 1 second shutter, Manual program, f/14, ISO 100, 18mm focal length. Increased contrast, vibrance, saturation in Camera Raw. Also slight warming with magenta tint.

Handrail Pool is a great spot in the park, although it is precarious going down the rail you see to the right, carrying camera gear. It's amazing this shot looks so peaceful, there were backpackers jumping off rocks on the other side! This has got to be my favourite shot of the trip. I know I said that last time about the spider, but you go to Karijini for the gorges, so this trumps a golden orb any day!

I've had people say, why not just Photoshop the rail out of the photo so it all looks natural? Well, one, that would be extremely fiddly and I think difficult (too much like hard work) and two, it's called Handrail Pool for a reason...

Dales Gorge, Karijini NP. Betsy again, with EF-S18-200mm lens set at 50mm. 1/4 sec shutter, f/25. Much the same RAW edits as above - warming and magenta tint, contrast, vibrance and saturation adjustments.

This was quite spectacular. We went down Dales Gorge hoping for some interesting light options at sunset and were rewarded with good conditions for water photos plus some really great golden reflections. I promise you, the gold has nothing to do with Photoshop. This was taken at the top of Fortescue Falls, but I thought, if I call this photo Fortescue Falls everyone is going to look at me like I'm crazy!

Knox Gorge, Karijini. Betsy once more (I only have one!) set at 18mm focal length. F/22, 2 sec shutter. Increased contrast, saturation and vibrance with a magenta tint in Camera RAW.

Just as above, the blue has not much at all to do with Photoshop (it may be slightly enhanced) - Knox Gorge really is blue in parts! This is a good example of smooth running water and gives a good indication of the terrain we were carrying camera gear over! But in all seriousness - blue rocks and purple rocks. Really impressive.

Cascades in Knox Gorge, Karijini. Canon EOS 50D with my Nifty Fifty (EF 50mm f/1.8 II), 0.8 sec shutter, f/22, ISO 100. Contrast, brightness, white balance adjustment as well as vibrance and saturation for two photos before stitching in CS4.

I realised on this trip that while the EF-S18-200mm is a brilliant all rounder lens for traveling, it does not specialise well. It's a pretty good zoom in a tight spot and the wide angle does capture a good landscape, however I do tend to miss out on those crystal clear shots. So I complemented it with my Nifty Fifty - this is literally the cheapest Canon lens you can buy. And I love it. It will take some time to master, but it's F-stop can go all the way up to 1.8. Brilliant. It doesn't give you great depth of field for landscapes usually, but I thought I would try it for some of the water photos in Knox Gorge to try and get increased sharpness. Above is the resulting photo - it's actually a panorama. I learnt to edit these RAW images by processing the first image, setting a preset of the settings so the second is processed exactly the same before stitching together.

You may have noticed a lot of talk about editing in Camera RAW in this post, and the captions on the photos indicate pretty much all my photos are edited slightly. I read once that all digital images usually require at least some tweaking in contrast and brightness. But for some purists, I may need to defend myself. When capturing a RAW image what you are actually doing is capturing a digital negative - that is, all the information collected by your camera's sensor. You then need to process them on the computer and it is not much different to developing a negative (not that I have ever done that - I'm pretty sure there are at least a few more controls...). All I really change is the contrast, brightness, vibrance and saturation. For my Karijini photos I warmed up the white balance and increased the tint to the magenta side for most photos to capture as many colours as possible. I will give you an example of what this does below:

Fortescue Falls, Dales Gorge Karijini. Betsy, at 18mm on tripod, 1/4 second, f/22, ISO 250.

This is the unedited version of this shot. One of the last I took before we headed up to the top of the gorge for the sunset. It is dark and the white balance is incorrect. Below is the processed version.

Same shot, only the colours have been corrected by adjusting the white balance and it's brighter and clearer. You particularly notice it in the water - the water has a slight blue tinge in the first shot, and is white in the second.  Could I have done this with my camera on the day I took the shot by adjusting settings? Good question. I like to think not as it was a custom white balance I set on the computer - I already have my camera set to capture slightly saturated images and as I said before, my 18-200mm lens is great at everything but a master of nothing. With more time and fiddling, I could have set a custom white balance on the camera that day, but when you are standing precariously on wet slippery rocks, with your camera pointing down this waterfall and you have to let it go for a few seconds - you want to make as little adjustments as possible!

As I understand it, it is no different than photographers who used to develop their own negatives and get all arty-farty with contrast and colour. Occasionally I mess with hues and gradients but with digital editing I have come to realise that less really is more.

Photographer's paradise

Karijini National Park, formerly known as the Hamersley Ranges. If you don't know where it is, frankly, I'm not telling because there were too many people there when we visited at Easter time!

None-the-less, this place is a photographers paradise - despite the constant threat of you falling down a gorge or dropping your camera off a cliff. For those of you who followed my previous blog while we were traveling, you will have seen shots of this place before, and heard a couple of stories about how treacherous but rewarding this place can be! They advertise a five or something days trip out here, just for photographers for, I kid you not, around $3,000. Better to just visit it yourself.

We visited with some friends of ours, camping at Dales Gorge for four nights. Karijini is one of the largest National Parks in Australia, and consists of several subterranean gorges. These are great fun to climb down, swim in and just admire. They are full of colour in the banded rocks and interesting rock formations carved out by water. But the colours, oh the colours, are just sensation. Deep, vibrant reds against clear deep blue skys, with white silhouette of snappy gums. Purple, blue, grey, red rocks are prolific.

Your typical Karijini banded rocks - how mind blowing are those colours? Taken with Betsy and my Nifty Fifty down the bottom of Joffre Gorge. Minor editing in RAW - increased warmth and slight magenta hue to bring out the purple rocks. Increased contrast and brightness

It is very isolated though, so being prepared is crucial. I took two batteries and two CF cards. I used both.

This trip was not what I expected. I went with the full intention of getting great photos of huge, impressive gorges - one in particular down the end of Hancock Gorge, however twas not to be - the sun was so blinking bright! I am convinced that the sun is more concentrated in the Pilbara. There is simply, more of it here. Makes it very difficult to take photos during the day.

As it turned out, I had some success with the water shots (after the sun started making its way to bed), which I will write a separate post about, but also a couple of wildlife shots, shown below.

Taken with Betsy and my 18-200mm lens, focal length 187mm. f/5.6, ISO 250, 1/400 shutter.  Minor adjustments in Camera RAW - contrast, exposure, clarity, vibrance and saturation.

 This shot of the golden orb is, ironically, one of my favorites from the trip. I also snapped one of him sucking a dratted fly dry, however is front legs were slightly out of focus on that one. A good zoom is great for shots like this. I may not have needed to go to Karijini to get a shot like this, but this harps back to lesson one: be prepared for every opportunity!

Betsy and my long lens again - 1/640 sec shutter, f/5.6, focal length 200mm ISO 250. Increased contrast, vibrance and saturation in Photoshop.

 This little guy visited the camp one morning. Unfortunately, I ran out of room on my CF card, so instead of shooting in RAW+S JPEG just shot in LG JPEG. This shot was just a JPEG but still came out ok. Plus, this guy is just way too pretty!

Betsy and long lens - 200mm, 1/2500 shutter, shutter priority program. f/5.6, ISO 250. Slight adjustments in Camera RAW - contrast, brightness, warmth, vibrance, saturation.

 Spinafex pigeon! Back in QLD, these guys are grey and called top knots and are considered quite, well, ordinary. But these guys have terrific colouring and cruise around the rocks and the spinafex - it's quite amazing to see these little guys getting around in such a harsh environment!

Keep an eye out for the second Karijini edition - water.

Long Exposure - Star Trails

These are photos I have been longing to take, but again been too lazy to go out after dark to find a nice dark spot to test it out.

A recent evening at Settler's Lookout at Cossack has filled me with hope. I was shooting some lightning of in the distance, leaving the shutter open for a few minutes at a time, when I realised to my delight I was also capturing some stars and some tiny trails. Sure, I kept bumping the seat I was resting my camera on, so they were a little blurry, and I need to get to the bottom of the RGB spots of colour that aren't supposed to be there, but hopefully, by the time you are reading this I will have been out to Karijini NP where I will have achieved a clearer image! Watch this space...