Not the best night

Jonzilla

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Name
Jon
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For Startrails

Well my other half was out watching a play and on the way home from dropping her off at the theatre I thought "what the heck" and went off to do a Star trail test.

When I was a few minutes away from the field I decided to shoot in I looked up, probably should have done it sooner, and low and behold. Cloudy. S***! Anyway decided to carry on as it was only a test. In the car park I set up my tripod and camera, got out my intervalometre and tried to get a good composition. 180 degrees of my view was light polluted, and a further 120 degrees had fireworks going off. FIREWORKS! Dur 5th of November! Idiot.

So anyway I was there and decided to carry on, I walked halfway into the field and stopped, decided that I couldn't be bothered to go to the other side of the field and point it back the way I had come, which was the only direction which wasn't light polluted and had fireworks going off. Setting up my tripod looking through the viewfinder, carefully making sure that some big trees were blocking any fireworks which may be going off in that direction, I was ready.

I got the intervalometre out, shoved the batteries in it, then went about playing with the settings... for half an hour. Nope couldn't work it out. So I just set it to continuous shooting mode and locked the shutter release in place, by now the clouds had gone, at least something went right.

I stood there in the middle of the field for fifteen minutes, getting thoroughly cold, damp and bored, eventually just went back and sat in the car while my camera was taking pictures 70 metres away. I couldn't see it but every 30 seconds I heard a reassuring "click click". Then I spotted another problem about 30,000 feet in the air, planes. Bloody loads of them, with their poncey lights flashing.

An hour later I retrieved my beloved camera and drove home, with the heater on full blast.

Back in the warm and comfort of my own home I download all the pictures, shove them into startrails.de and inspect my hard work.

This is what I got, not compositionally amazing, or average, pretty ***** really and I am sure it's not even in focus, or maybe that is the 30sec exposure.

8159254872_4fdb021d8b_z.jpg


8159256208_cdbceb10e2_z.jpg


I was just playing around with white balance do you prefer blue or grey?

and I also made a timelapse here

What can I do to improve? I only have a 50mm f1.8 which is more 80mm on my cam, unfortunately I think I need a wider lens but I can't afford one yet. I will be going out again once everyone has used up there fireworks and try again.
 
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They are not focused. You're not using auto focus are you? If so, turn it off and focus manually or just set to infinity.

Why didn't you take some with fireworks in the frame? I reckon that would have added interest. Just star trails by themselves are not that interesting are they? Star trails in an otherwise already interesting image can look awesome.


I prefer the natural colours in the top image.


[edit] Looking at your time lapse, there seems to be changes in exposure. Is the camera on Manual? It should be.
 
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I thought that to, no it was in manual. I didn't include fireworks because they just ended up being a massive blown out circle, I could have messed about a bit with shutter length I suppose to include them but I was just trying to to do test for when I do a proper star trail.

The settings were

Manual f2.8 30" ISO 400

I didn't change it from there and this was a combination of 105 pics over an hour. I don't know why there is changes in exposure, would the fireworks flashes do that?

And yes I used a torch on my hand to auto focus to closest, then turned to manual and turned the ring the otherway (I was told this was infinity, but it didn't seem to work)

Like I say this was only a test so that when I come to do it properly I get it right.

Thanks for the reply

Jon
 
Infinity on my lenses is all the way to one side and then back a tiny bit. I really miss the markings on modern lenses. If you've got live view best thing to do is zoom in on a point a fair distance away and get that sharp, that is probably infinity.
 
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