As I Xi It

Last night had moderately clear skies so I gave the startrails another go, this time with my 40D and fisheye lens. Pic from 58 stacked images with a bit of levels adjustment. ISO 100, f/8.0, 2.5 mins, 3 secs intervals.

Fisheye startrail

I wanted to do some startrail photography when I was in Dartmoor but it was just too cold and I just wanted to snuggle into my sleeping bag with my many layers on. Anyway, this evening, I thought I’d do a test out in the yard. It wasn’t the ideal weather conditions for it since there was some high level cloud but I figured I’d give it a go anyway. Decided to use the 350D with a 50mm prime along with the timer remote. It was as easy as setting the thing up and then leaving it to its own devices.

The remote was programmed to take a 1 minute exposure with 5 seconds interval in between shots. This pic was composed of 80 images stacked together using Startrails.exe and the final image meddled with in Photoshop. Compositionally, it’s not brilliant and I think in future, I’ll set the white bal to tungsten. Unfortunately, if you look carefully, you can see that some airplanes got in the way, nethertheless, it’s probably one of my more successful attempts. In the past I went with a single long exposure image and it just blew everything out what with the light pollution.

Urb' trails

On an unrelated note, I saw a really bright shooting star this evening while setting up. Unfortunately, it was just out of frame. To date, I’ve seen three shooting stars (Swedish Lapland, Dartmoor, London) , caught two, lost one.

I was in Dartmoor last weekend with the intention of wild camping which turned out to be not so wild. We did however pitch our tent in a paddock complete with horse turds. Anyway, it was also a full moon and we had nice clear skies. It’d be the ideal location for star-trails. What these pics are missing though is the aurora. I miss the northern lights.

Yesterday evening after work I went shopping for some heavy duty gloves for an up coming winter sports holiday. I had my G11 with me and did a spot of night photography, strolled around Covent Garden, down to Trafalgar Square and ending at Picadilly. The Christmas lights this year are somewhat abyssmal. I reminised about how when I was an undergraduate, Jac and I would go night photographying along the river in the freezing cold. Oh the memories. It’s not quite so much fun when you’re shooting solo.

Here are a couple of pics I’ve taken so far with the G11. It’s a very capable piece of kit!